In the present paper a new assumed stress finite element method, based on a complementary energy method, is developed for the analysis of cracks in angle-ply laminates. In this procedure, the fully three-dimensional stress state (including transverse normal and shear stresses) is accounted for; the mixed-mode stress and strain singularities, whose intensities vary within each layer near the crack front, are built into the formulation a priori; the interlayer traction reciprocity conditions are satisfied a priori; and the individual cross-sectional rotations of each layer are allowed; thus resulting in a highly efficient and cost-effective computational scheme for practical application to fracture studies of laminates. Results obtained from the present procedure, for the case of an uncracked laminate under bending and for the case of a laminate with a through-thickness crack under far-field tension, their comparison with other available data, and pertinent discussion, are presented. N accurate three-dimensional stress analysis of angle-ply laminates with cracks and/or holes, as opposed to the use of simpler classical laminates plate theories, is often times mandatory to understand 1) the complicated feature of the often-observed non-self-similar crack growth in sym- metric angle-ply laminates; 2) the subcritical damage in the form of matrix crazing, splitting, and delamination that is observed to precede final failure in a laminate; and 3) to more clearly understand the hole-size effects in a laminate. Quasi-three-dimensional analyses of cracked angle-ply laminates, with the assumption of 1) zero transverse normal stress in the laminate, 2) perfect bonding between lamina, and 3) each laminate being treated as a homogeneous anisotropic medium, were recently reported by Wang et al. ! The procedures in Ref. 1 -do not account, a prior, for the mixed- mode stress and strain singularities near the crack front, and hence involve expensive computations using very fine finite element meshes of conventional, polynomial-based elements. From these very-fine-mesh finite element solutions, even though one may obtain high stress-gradient solutions in the limit, it is often inconvenient to extract the results for mixed- mode stress intensity factors near the crack front. Also, the finite element that is used in Ref. 1 is the multilayer assumed- stress hybrid element originally developed by Mau et al.2 for the analysis of uncracked laminates. In the procedure of Ref. 2, a stress field is assumed independently in each layer and interlayer traction reciprocity conditions are enforced through the method of Lagrange multipliers, which necessarily complicates the formulation and results in expensive com- putations. Also, since the stresses are independently assumed in each layer, the computational procedure in Refs. 1 and 2 become prohibitively expensive for a large number of layers. Finally, it is noted that the effects of transverse normal stress a33 (x3 being the thickness-coordinate of the laminate) are ignored in Refs. 1 and 2.