New Jersey Statutes Annotated

What are your rights if you are fired from your job? What should you do if you are a crime victim or witness? How can you fight a child custody battle? What can you do if your landlord refuses to provide you with heat in the winter? You and the Law in New Jersey, newly updated, is the ideal guidebook to assist readers in understanding the law, their rights, and how to get legal help. In clear, straightforward language, the book describes how law is made, how to do legal research, how the state and federal court systems work, how to get help if you can't afford a lawyer, how to hire a lawyer, and what to do if you are sued. The second edition contains much new information, including a chapter on credit, debt, and banking, and others on the rights of senior citizens, veterans, and people with disabilities. The authors have also expanded their information on the rights of renters, homeowners, and consumers of public utilities, as well as their treatment of employment law. They have rewritten chapters on health and public benefits to address the recent sweeping reforms of federal and state law. Other topics include family matters such as marriage, divorce, adoption, and domestic violence; the landlord-tenant relationship and buying a home; consumer rights; the criminal justice system; and citizen involvement in environmental law.

The Revision of 1877 satisfied an 1871 act of the Legislature to "revise, simplify, arrange, and consolidate" all the general and permanent public statutes of New Jersey." It is valuable today chiefly as a tool for tracing the history of legislation. As Axel-Lute observes in his introduction, "[t]here are nearly seven hundred current sections in New Jersey Statutes Annotated for which the oldest source cited in the historical note is the Revision of 1877. To trace these sections back to earlier sources, the researcher must use marginal notes and enactment date information in the 1877 work" (iii). In addition to his informative introduction, Axel-Lute has added a detailed table of contents, a feature that wasn't included in the original work.