ASA Practical Aviation & Aerospace Law Textbook
ASA-PRCT-AV-LAW8
Description:
Updated and expanded in its eighth edition, Practical Aviation & Aerospace Law and its companion workbook function as a comprehensive instructive package for undergraduate and graduate aviation law courses. This book, as a set or a stand-alone textbook, is an invaluable reference guide for aviation and aerospace business managers, pilots, maintenance personnel, aircraft owners, air traffic controllers, air safety investigators, operators of unmanned aircraft, and others involved in aviation or aerospace as a profession or hobby.
Practical Aviation & Aerospace Law provides readers with the basic legal knowledge and perspective to understand how the legal system works in this industry. The authors guide you to recognize and avoid common legal pitfalls, and help you realize when you need to call a lawyer. This seventh edition reflects recent judicial decisions and changes in statutory, regulatory and international treaty law. It covers topics surrounding the burgeoning unmanned aircraft system (UAS) and commercial spaceflight segments as well, from an increasingly global viewpoint.
Authors J. Scott Hamilton and Sarah Nilsson write concisely, clearly and yet conversationally about the complex field of law, including frequent examples from personal experience in practice. This combines to create for the industry a succinct foundation in understanding how to apply the law to aviation and aerospace interests and operations.
As the title suggests, this book takes a practical viewpoint. It aims to provide the reader with basic legal knowledge and perspectives along with an understanding of how the legal system works in relation to aviation and aerospace activities. It aims to provide that in a form that can be applied to help you recognize and avoid common legal pitfalls, and to recognize when the moment has come to stop what you are doing and consult your lawyer. If this book had a subtitle, it would be How to Avoid Aviation Lawyers and When to Call One.
No book can hope to advise you what to do in every conceivable situation. In advising our clients, lawyers must take into consideration not only the law but also the facts and circumstances. In over thirty-five years of practicing law—in private practice, as government and later corporate counsel—co-author Hamilton represented clients in well over three thousand aviation matters involving every subject in this book, and never saw two identical cases. While similar facts give rise to similar considerations, slight differences in the facts and circumstances often lead to major differences in the best approach to solving the problem. Examples in this book and its accompanying workbook are drawn largely from cases encountered in both authors’ practices.
The law itself is also in a constant state of change. Even as we write, the Congress of the United States, fifty state legislatures, and a vast number of administrative agencies are daily making changes to statutes and regulations, while hundreds of federal and state courts are writing and publishing case decisions on the interpretation, application, and constitutionality of those laws and regulations, along with decisions that modify, clarify, or sometimes confuse the common law. Simultaneously, U.S. diplomats are negotiating with their foreign counterparts new or amended treaties to be ratified by their governments. Such changes as have occurred since the seventh edition of this book was published are one reason for this expanded and updated eighth edition.
While this process of continual change keeps the lawyer’s work from becoming routine to the point of boredom, it also means that what was good advice yesterday (or the day this book went to press) may no longer be good advice today. While the fundamental legal principles discussed in this book are less susceptible to sudden obsolescence than, say, a text on the Internal Revenue Code and IRS Regulations, you are cautioned not to attempt to solve actual individual legal problems on the basis of information contained in this book. Finding yourself faced with an actual legal problem, you should recognize that the time has come to consult your lawyer.
The Authors:
Dr. J. Scott Hamilton is an Adjunct Professor for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Worldwide & Prescott, AZ campuses. He previously served as executive director (chief operating officer) of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), after serving as the national organization’s general counsel. CAP owns and operates the world’s largest fleet of single-engine piston-powered aircraft, some 560, plus a few dozen gliders and hot air balloons. He is an experienced pilot (Private Pilot with airplane, single engine, land and sea, instrument airplane, advanced and instrument ground instructor ratings, and about 1,700 hours flight time) who has owned several aircraft and flown over 70 types. He is also an experienced skydiver (with 2,500 jumps) who served as a combat demolition specialist and HALO instructor in Army Special Forces.
Dr. Hamilton founded a law firm specializing in aviation law in Colorado, where he practiced law for 25 years and served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Denver, and as an Adjunct Instructor for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and for the Aerospace Science Department at Metropolitan State College of Denver, then served as Senior Assistant Attorney General in Wyoming.
He holds a B.A. degree in economics and business from Hendrix College; J.D. from the University of Denver; and LL.M. in aerospace law from Southern Methodist University, where he was named the Easterwood Foundation Scholar, and a Master of Aeronautical Science from Embry-Riddle.
Hamilton has published widely on aviation law, including the Practical Aviation & Aerospace Law textbook, workbook, and teachers’ manual, now in the 7th edition, and Amazon.com’s bestseller in the category of “Air & Space.” He also co-authored Labor Relations in the Aviation and Aerospace Industries textbook and study guide (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).
He has received many honors, including induction into the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame (1988) and Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame (1998).
Sarah Nilsson is an Assistant Professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and a practicing attorney in Arizona, where her practice focuses on aviation/aerospace and business law. She previously managed an Aerospace Magnet program at an inner-city high school in Phoenix. Nilsson gained extensive aviation operating experience working as a cargo pilot and flight instructor and now volunteers as a safety representative on the FAA Safety Team. Her research interests include aviation, space, and unmanned aircraft systems law.
In 2017, Sarah published Drones Across America with the American Bar Association—a textbook devoted to Federal, State, and local unmanned aircraft regulations, laws, and ordinances. Since 2015, she has been interviewed by news media on TV and radio and has presented at numerous conferences and symposia across the nation for The Citadel, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, Arizona Geographic Information Council, and the Air and Space Law Forum of the American Bar Association to name a few.
Instructor Resources:
A Teacher's Manual is available to instructors upon request by emailing: asa@asa2fly.com. Please provide the name of your employer, your position, and a phone number where you can be reached. Alternately, instructors may fax their request on school letterhead to 425-235-0128; please include email address. The PDF will be emailed directly to you.
Updates:
Read ASA’s Update to Practical Aviation & Aerospace Law for changes and corrections to this book since its publication date.
Hardcover, 520 pages.
