Maine Civil Remedies by Andrew M. Horton & Peggy L. McGehee

If there is any ongoing dispute within the legal community that one could properly characterize as a Great Debate, that dispute concerns the nature and sources of judicial power. Most recently that debate has manifested itself in nuanced and subtle disagreements about how a court ought to interpret enacted law, whether found in statutes or written constitutions. That argument about judicial interpretation, and more precisely about the philosophical possibility of correct textual interpretations, is itself simply a more scholarly manifestation of an earlier dispute over whether judges should "legislate" when they resolve difficult legal issues, or should instead constrain themselves to a "strict construction" of the law. This debate about judicial power, so resistant to clear answer when directly addressed, has been helped along recently by Andrew M. Horton and Peggy L. McGehee in their 1988 treatise entitled Maine Civil Remedies. The authors, two well-known civil litigators in Portland, Maine, do not articulate in their preface a desire to wrestle with that lofty jurisprudential issue; rather, they seek more modestly to provide a "book [that] will be helpful to members of the bench and bar in their daily work." Horton and McGehee have succeeded wonderfully in their intended purpose—as a practitioner's treatise, Maine Civil Remedies is of such distinct scope and quality that it will surely become a fixture on the shelves of attorneys and judges across the State.