BOOK REVIEWS
Injunctive Relief:
Don’t Bother
Reviewed by Jeremiah Newhall, Esq.
Injunctive Relief is a quick-reference book
designed for busy litigators who might only
occasionally deal with a request for a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order (TRO). And if you need to know
the black letter law for seeking or opposing
preliminary injunctive relief, the book will
serve that purpose. It also includes charts of
the average time from filing to a ruling on
motions for injunctions in all of the federal
district courts, though the sample size is too
small to be meaningful. Given the limited
shelf-life of a reference on case law, it is
hard to justify the cost for a reference on so
narrow a subject.
Though the book was serviceable, I cannot recommend it. It repeats too much
material from one section to another. The
book has three authors, and one wonders if
they read each other’s work, given their reuse the same excerpts from the same cases again and again. To be fair, much of the
repetition is by design: the book is meant as
a quick-reference, and the authors assume
that the reader has jumped to the section
of interest without reading any portion that
came before. That makes some sense, but
there were still far too many cases that were
explained and then re-explained just a few
pages or paragraphs later. Reading the book
to learn the law is like trying to learn physics from a mathematician with no short-term
memory. Every few pages, the conversation
starts over. On page 268, we are introduced
to the case of Henry Hope X-Ray Products
Inc. v. Marron Carrel, Inc., 674 F.2d 1336,
1343 (9th Cir. 1982), and the incorporation
by reference of a secret appendix into a preliminary injunction. And then, on page 271,
the case is explained again, as though the
reader had never heard of the Hope X-Ray
case and its secret appendix.
The book also provides no analysis of the
rules that it recites. It just