Other Books

Road to the Robes:
A Federal Judge Recollects Young
Years and Early Times (AuthorHouse 2006)

Road to the Robes, book cover Road to the Robes is not about the law but about life. Not quite a formal memoir, it is rather a series of remembrances. A member of the Greatest Generation, born in 1919, the author takes the reader from his early childhood in a coal mining and mill town industrial suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, life as a lawyer and trial judge in Pennsylvania, on through to the summer of 1968 when he first put on the robes of a U.S. Circuit Judge.
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Winning On Appeal:
Better Briefs and Oral Argument
(NITA 2d ed. 2003)

Winning on Appeal, book cover This book, written as a desk reference for lawyers, is more than a style manual on how to write for and speak to an appellate tribunal, it is a practical guide about how to improve written and oral argument. It is called Winning on Appeal because that’s what lawyers want to do and should want to do. Although no promise exists that the book will produce a satisfactory result, in a certain percentage of cases--in which the rule of law, and therefore, the decision, could go either way--how and where the axe will fall may depend upon the quality of appellate advocacy. It is here where what is said in this book’s pages may produce a difference.
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Logic For Lawyers:
A Guide to Clear Legal Thinking
(NITA 3d ed. 1997)

Logic for Lawyers, book cover This book addresses legal reasoning or legal logic. While not challenging Justice Holmes’ classic statement that “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” it offers telling arguments that legal reasoning or legal logic may play an equal or even more significant role in the life of the law. A basic understanding of logical principles will serve law students and practicing attorneys as they strive to produce clear, reasoned thinking and will assist judges in examining precedents and arguments more precisely and in writing leaner and crisper opinions.
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The Judicial Process:
Text, Materials and Cases
(West 2d ed. 1996)

The Judicial Process, book cover A textbook for the study of the judicial process, this book is a collection of writings chosen to provide theoretical and pragmatic insight into judicial decision making. The study of the judicial process is a study of how courts decide cases. It is an analysis of the decision making process as it actually takes place and as it ought to take place. This book is designed to be a comprehensive, but not exhaustive, tool to assist in isolating and examining components of both the decision making and decision justifying processes and to demonstrate the interrelationship between the two.
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Aldisert’s Reflections on the Law
(work in progress)

Although Judge Aldisert's views on the law could be reflected by his judicial opinions deciding cases since 1961, this forthcoming book will allow the author, unshackled by the limitations of the factual basis of a judicial opinion, to further explore philosophy, jurisprudence and jurisprudential temperament. He has not only written two editions of The Judicial Process: Text, Materials and Cases, but also over 50 articles in professional journals of which a substantial number describe not only the philosophy of law but also a philosophy that can be discerned, identified and defended. These writings form the rich mother load from which the author's reflections will evolve.