Law Books

i just started (well just INCORPORATED) my catering business. i found this book to be written in an accessible and unintimidating style. Fishman goes to great lengths to give examples, cite external sources for additional information, and generally uncomplicates the IRS jargon. now only if i had read this 6 months ago, i would really be ahead of the game!

This book has the information I have been looking for. It is the most detailed (and clearly written) of any books that I've purchased to help me know what is allowable (and not) as deductions for my small business. Helps in planning as well.
SUPERB!

I read this book after forming a C-Corp in California (using the Nolo guide). Although I am familiar with many biz deductions, this book walks you through many examples of deductions you can take if you plan ahead. I really like the "Day in the Life of..." examples of how you can maximize legal deductions pertaining to mileage. There's an excellent section on home office deductions. My husband, a self-admitted dummy when it comes to expense reports, taxes, etc., picked up the book after I was done, and even he understands the concepts. Already he has found deductions for his sole proprietorship and non-reimbursed employee biz expenses. Great value and so easy to understand. Highly recommend.

This book is a must small business owners because it can improve their bottom line. Although it provides fairly good overview of tax deudctions, it should not be used as a comprehensive reference for tax professionals.

The book is a relatively light read in a highly readable format. Each tax deduction has a good overview and a case example to boot. It isn't, however, an answer to complex tax questions which the book willingly acknowledges should be taken to a tax professional. For most business owners, this book should be sufficient for most of the tax deduction questions they may have. This book certainly answered all of mine.

The book provides valuable information on the probability of an IRS audit (don't form sole proprietorship if you want to avoid an audit) and how one can minimize one's chances of an audit.

Great book. Just one comment. A lot of the text in this book is identical to the text in Tax Deductions for Professionals. You don't need both books; choose one.

I couldn't believe how much the lsat changed in the newer version, I am so glad I had a chance to review them before taking the test. Well worth the money!

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership is an excellent resource at our school for our student leadership training component. Our executive members of the student council use it for training and planning. Each student is assigned a chapter to present in the weekly meetings.

It gives a focus for the group and the concepts are very applicable to their day to day activities as they provide leadership to the student body. Thanks Amazon and John Maxwell for making our school an excellent place to train the leaders of tomorrow.

Great book, great condition! I was lucky to find this book at this price. I will shop here again.

The workbook seems to be a "Readers Digest" version of the original book. While the questions can be thought-provoking, the stories are a bit predictable and common.

This is a powerful book. I cannot say enough about John Maxwell's ability to put things into perspective. This has helped me to understand why some of my managers are struggling and what to look for in hiring new ones.

Let me say that I am a chick from the hood and we do not come across books like this on the regular, but I got my hands on it and it really grabbed and kept me attention. This book made me think and realize that if you use the leadership abilities that God has given us all, anything is possible!!! I recommend that everyone read this book!!! This book was awesome!!!

In Left to Tell Imaculee Ilibagiza, a Rwandan holocaust survivor, recounts her story and attributes her survival to her strong faith in God. Most western Christian readers of this story are swept away in the miraculous aspects of Imaculee's nearly 100 days of survival, most of which were in a tiny bathroom in a Protestant pastor's house. What is overlooked is her very African emphasis on sacred objects for protection and an image of God which is more shaman than one who loves all humanity and grieves when we humans depart from his commandment to "Love on another." The imagine of her father with his rosary in one hand and his spear in the other is particularly striking. Thus, almost all Hutus in this story are depicted as untrustworthy or completely evil. Imaculee even portrays the pastor who at great risk to himself and his family saved her as jealous of her father and heartless when he cannot keep her brothers. Similarly, as she focuses on her survival as a proof of the power of faith, she fails to ask why so many many others who were likely just as faithful were killed. Imaculee does state that this is only her story and not an attempt to explain the causes of the Rwandan genocide, but certainly as a young university student she must have known more about the sources of the seething tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis. Imaculee gives her explanation of why she was left to tell the story of the 1994 genocide, but neglects to ask why 800,000 others, many of whom were Hutu, were not.

It is unbelievable that people could kill so many people in such a gruesome fashion. It is even more unbelievable that Immaculee could forgive those killers. This book is about more than just the genocide, it is about the power and absolute necessity of forgiveness. Ultimately, the only one Immaculee could really escape the genocide was through forgiveness. Wonderful book.

Amazing story. I strongly suggest everyone to read the story, it's profound and a real eye opener. As an American, the majority of us have no idea what it's like to be put into poverty and suffering as she and millions like her have experienced.

I love stories that tell how God works in the lives of His people. This story is among the best I've ever read.

Left to Tell is a powerful story of one womens tragedies and survival experienced during the Genocide in Rwanda. This book brought tears and joy to my heart; it inspired me to know that through any horrible and life threatening experience a belief and faith in God will transcend all atrocities man will commit. It is also about how forgiveness can calm and soothe the soul so life can move on with peace in your heart.

I've been CTO for several venture backed startups for the last few gigs. So if like me you want to prepare an application draft as thoroughly as possible before you call your attorney (and open your wallet) then this book will pay for itself on the first chapter. Like when it comes to having my car fixed, I don't do what the mechanic (or expert) does for a living, but I sure want to understand his rationale and learn from him. That's what this book does for the reader. Take one giant leap forward in undertanding the language, strategy and reasoning of the pros and enjoy the insights and confidence that comes with an enhaced command of the art.

Invention Analysis and Claiming: A Patent Lawyer's Guide As an entrepreneur, I found Ronald Slusky's book supremely helpful! We have numerous inventions at my startup company, and we needed a 'language' for communicating with our patent counsel so that our ideas would be more efficiently conveyed. And Ron's book fit the bill! I highly recommend it to any technology company who works with patent counsel. It will save them a lot of time - and money!

I read this book and immediatly manadated that all of my attorneys read it as well. I also recommended it as essential reading for my law school students. Ron may call himself "old school" but in my opinion his way of thinking about patent claims is the only correct way. I've employed and taught Ron's claim drafting strategies for many years and although I might hate to admit it, I learned a lot from this book.

I wish I had this book when I was first starting out 17 years ago. Instead, I read the claim construction decisions and learned on the job. Claim drafting really is an art form and Ron's book gives you the framework necessary to begin crafting patent claims with a purpose.

I was thinking about writing a text book about how to draft patent applications, but now I'm not so sure I could add much to what Ron has written.

Kirk Teska, author of Patent Savvy for Managers: Spot & Protect Valuable Innovations in Your Company

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn to draft valuable, enforceable patent claims. The book is very well written and very clear, and the examples are thoughtfully chosen. I learned much of what I know about elevating patent prosecution to an art form from the author, and this book contains his expert insights. I have personally benefited from this book and intend to buy it for each of my associates.

I'm a newly minted patent associate. I've seen other massive tomes around on drafting basics. I'm aware that the bosses rarely have time to initiate a tutorial for the associates. So, what's the solution? I just happened to read an ABA pitch for Slusky's book and picked it up. What a book it is!

It's not easy to take complex subject matter and distill it down into its key components while being educational and keeping the pace light, but dare I say as a novice patent attorney, that Slusky seems to have accomplished just that. I don't know the man, but I couldn't help but think as I read this book that he was standing over my shoulder at my desk, shepherding me along.

It's so clear to me: read with a goal--begin with the problem/solution and keep it in your head throughout your drafting. Slusky's mantra has made it seem so much easier. And isn't that the mark of a good teacher after all, substituting mastery for mystery?

Some people don't learn by reading, but by doing. Fair enough, but this book, unlike its more massive brethren in the field, packs more useable knowledge per page and in an enjoyable style to read, than the others ever could.

Thanks. I feel ready to tackle the most challenging of patent apps!

Oh for heaven's sake! Let's not get carried away. The Bluebook is a useful guide to the complexities of legal citation ONLY because ... get this ... the Bluebook CREATED those complexities in the first place! (What do you expect when you let a bunch of Harvard *students* write the rules?) That's right -- the rules are the rules ONLY because the Bluebook says that's how it should be done, and the entire legal profession has foolishly signed on. The ALWD manual -- a guide produced by practicing lawyers who teach writing -- is MUCH better than the Bluebook in many ways, but no actually uses it outside academia. Until ALWD is the standard in legal practice, you'll need the Bluebook if you plan to be a lawyer.

What stories The Bluebook can tell! Winding up late Friday evening, knowing that a Petition for Appeal is due on Monday. Putting in sixteen hours on Saturday, only to be devastated by the realization that one is less than one-quarter through. Putting in another sixteen hours on Sunday, with only a very rough draft in hand at midnight. Getting into work early Monday morning, to begin another eighty-hour week... so very, very blue.

Let's be honest. A lot of people felt that Bluebook had fallen off. After that award show confrontation with ALWD and the concealed weapons charges, Bluebook looked like they were on the ropes. That only makes this 18th edition more triumphant for the Bluebook. A stunning return to the form that made them such an irresistible bunch of ragamuffins to begin with, Bluebook has a sure answer to the naysayers who thought they couldn't adapt to the electronic movement--a blistering tribute to Internet citation.

For anyone interested in their new "harder" sound, the blue practitioner pages don't disappoint. Meanwhile the smooth, sculptural rhythms of "cases in textual sentences" will leave a smile on your face.

Overall, the soothing melodies of this consistently powerful album are ideal for any mood, whether it be insomnia or deadline adrenaline rushes. And let's be honest, it's the Bluebook. You're going to buy it. As another reviewer observed: buy it, don't download it off the internet! The artists really deserve our support.

Forget the New York Times bestseller list! Out of the anals of human history comes a book so compelling, so emotional, so all encompassing, that it defies description. On a level with "Great Expectations," mere words cannot describe its insightful witticisms ("Go forth and construe")("To interplead is human, to demur...devine"), its quaint conundrums ("To quash or not to quash, that is the interlocutory question"), its prophetic wisdom ("a footnote, in the right format, is worth a thousand words"), and yet its ultimate tragedy ("As you shall sow, so shall you replevin"). No true literary scholar should be without their own copy. Why wait for law school when you can own your copy today!

Mom & Dad, buy this book and a Black's Law Dictionary for your law student- to-be. If you buy anything when you go to law school, buy this. Current attorneys should own a copy; paralegals need to memorize it. I would never put pen to paper and write anything without this book by my side. It is a complete and easy to use reference guide. A time and grade saver for law students accross the nation.

I have seen pimpin ken on tv and ddecided to see what his book was all about. After recieving the book I started reading it and was hooked..I read and re-read the book and really grapsed all the information. Do not let the book title fool you, this is more a motivational and information based book on how to better yourself. Great book and I would highly recommend it.

Bottom line Pimpin Ken has pimped the game of life once again.
Any of these laws can be used as a road map to success in any career tract chosen.

It is apparent though he left out a large amount of the deep parts of the game of pimpin' but it is more information than any other book on this topic to date.

After reading PIMPOLOGY, I would place it in the same category as Niccolo Machiavelli's THE PRINCE. Like he states in the book, he is NOT promoting the trafficking of flesh. However, he does give a lesson about human nature. When I read it, there were experiences he's had that I witnessed from my college coaches, former bosses and other characters in business. Just because his background deals with pimping at a street level, I'll go to what he states in the last chapter. He states that the oldest pimp game on Earth is the same as what builds nations: the control of money and people to achieve an objective or series of objectives.

It's really a book about power and how it's used as a means to an end. Besides, it may help the reader recognize when a "pimp" game is being run on them and devise a counterattack to the game.

That should be the title. Very few new things to learn. The rest can be found in other motivational books. It seems that he tried to fill pages of pimp knowledge with unrelated subjects to make a book.

DON'T BUY THIS, ALL HE DOES IS TALK ABOUT HOW HE MADE IT IN THE GAME & THE RULES THAT HE STOOD BY, NO INSTRUCTIONS FOR YOU "LIMPS". I READ IT JUST TO READ IT. BUT IF YOU READING IT TO BE A "PIMP" DON'T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB.

I enjoyed reading this book. A lot. I've worked in the high-tech business and can vouch for many of the things presented throughout the pages. I did find that the book repeated many points, seemingly unnecessarily, and I do wish that more time would have been spent on ideas for how to solve the problems that exist.

An excellent book. The chapter on Russia's efforts to adopt property rights in the retail and apartment markets alone is worth the price.

Heller's main thesis is that too much ownership can work to 'gridlock' economic progress, investment and innovation. This is explored in how granting too large a bundle of rights for patents has hobbled many high-technology, biotechnology and pharmaceutical development efforts, threatening U.S. prosperity and consumer well-being.

Also, a fine chapter on how U.S. radio spectrum, subject for decades to FCC over-specification of permissible uses and politically-constrained allocation practices, is presently a mostly-wasted public resource.

This is a fascinating book. Michael Heller says he got the key insight to the problem he describes in this book in the faulty way the old Soviet Union tried to create private property upon its dissolution. For example, let's say you have been operating a store and with the return of private property, you might expect that you would either get the store or be able to buy it from the state or some such process that would let you continue operating the store. However, you forget that all those Soviet bureaucrats have to get property too! So, some people formerly with the government would also be assigned rights of ownership to the property and your store. This means all of you need to share in its profits and must agree on how it is to be operated. Unfortunately, this also empowers the owners who have no real interest in working the store. They will demand to be bought out in order to let the store function. So, the store cannot function and will be closed with the building sitting vacant. Was society improved by this process?

We all know about the problem of commons. Say there was a well producing apple orchard that we turn into a park that no one owns and everyone can use as they see fit. Will the apple trees be tended to? Will the apples be disturbed to those who need it? Or will the trees be untended, the apples taken by those who want to hoard or sell them, or might the trees be cut down for their wood? All we know is that the orchard will be destroyed. Private property, rightly assigned, can protect resources by those who have an interest in their continuing. When ownership becomes too granular, what Heller calls anticommons, it freezes assets and keeps them unused just as surely as the commons problem does. If that apple orchard were owned equally by 1,000 people who each had a portion of each tree, gridlock would set in because nothing could be decided and nothing would be done to care for, harvest, or use the tree productively.

The author uses many real life business stories to illustrate his points. I found his arguments interesting and very much worth thinking about. His central examples focus on the way our current patent laws for medicines and pharmaceutical manufacturing prevent the creation of new and beneficial medicines. He also shows why our radio spectrum is mostly empty because of the crazy way we license it. The United States is far behind in the products and services available in our telephones, TVs, radios, and other uses of this precious resource. Leaving it unused is just as silly as overuse. We also get a tour of how less than optimal private solutions are created when government creates either a commons or an anticommons problem. Heller then takes us to Moscow and shows us the mess there and offers some steps we can take to fix problems in our own economy.

Good reading.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

Every once in a while a gifted academic writes a book about a technical subject that changes the way the lay public sees the world. Michael Heller has written such a book. The Gridlock Economy illuminates by giving language to a phenomena that is all around us but we've had no word for. The stories he tells are chilling and heart wrenching. But he gives us hope as well. By describing gridlock and why it happens - the word he coins is "anticommons" - Professor Heller lead the way to creative problem solving. This book is a must read for policy makers in all fields.

Michael Heller's Gridlock Economy is this year's must-read popular economics book. As reviewers at Slate, Time, and elsewhere have noted, Heller's book compares well to 2005's mega-hit Freakonomics, as well as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, James Surowiecki's (of The New Yorker) The Wisdom of Crowds, and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail.

Gridlock Economy shares two important characteristics with those books: a compelling central organizing idea and great writing. The central organizing idea is that "too much ownership" can stifle economic innovation. By "too much ownership," Heller is referring to the kind of situation that arises with increasing frequency across all the key sectors of the new economy including biotechnology, software, computer hardware, music, movies, and finance. Our efforts to promote innovation by granting patents and copyrights (and other government-sponsored forms of intellectual property protection) can often come back to bite us.

Heller provides dozens of interesting examples across the entire range of the new economy. His lead example involves the difficulties that a researcher at a big drug company is having pursuing a promising cure for Alzheimers. To make headway, the researcher needs to purchase or license a host of patents held by a not small number of competitors. Our current patent system gives --for better and, in this case, for worse-- gives each patent holder involved the capacity to hold up this important research. If we're lucky an entrepreneurial "patent bundler" will come along and piece together the necessary patents and licenses. Meanwhile, we're stuck in Heller's gridlock.

I bought this book after using the LSAC's The Official LSAT SuperPrep and The Next 10 Actual, Official LSAT PrepTest (Lsat Series). These older tests, though roughly identical in format, have very different questions from those found on newer tests. I began to notice the difference after having taken two tests with remarkably poor performance on the logic games. I then completed the most recent test I owned, The Official LSAT PrepTest 51 and earned a score more in line with what I had projected.
The simple LSAT prep advice of taking as many tests as possible holds true, but I strongly recommend using more current materials.