"This book teaches students the critical skills of legal reasoning. This popular book is a practical and clear guide that explains the many ways lawyers analyze the law. The authors demystify legal analysis by examining the foundations and methodology of legal problem solving and by discussing the different levels of critical thinking necessary to develop effective legal arguments. The book emphasizes the importance of applying the law as opposed to relying excessively on formulaic methods of analysis. New to the second edition, the book examines rule-based reasoning and the implicit rule; deductive analysis and resolving statutory ambiguity; case-law reasoning and inductive analysis; the role of policy in legal argument; and the structure and variations of legal argument and CREAC. New examples and exercises are also included"--
"Like the popular earlier editions, the fourth edition of A Lawyer Writes puts the reader in the place of a first-year attorney faced with real-life assignments. In doing so, it teaches law students not only how to succeed in law school, but also how to succeed in the practice of law. Using graphics and visual samples that demonstrate both effective and ineffective analytical techniques, this updated edition illustrates best practices for objective legal analysis and provides an overview of the transition from objective to persuasive writing. The content and examples in the fourth edition have been supplemented, updated, and reorganized to provide an easy-to-use, step-by-step approach for learning legal analysis and objective writing. A Lawyer Writes aims to provide clear and concrete instruction about each facet of legal analysis, using the same order students will follow when performing the tasks in legal practice. The textbook also provides the relevant theory and background behind the choices attorneys make in their legal writing, enabling students to transfer those techniques to future settings. Speaking to its readers in a straightforward manner, A Lawyer Writes communicates essential skills and theories students can use throughout a lifetime of legal practice"--
Legal Analysis: 100 Exercises for Mastery: Practice for Every Law Student offers 100 paced exercises to sharpen students' legal analysis skills. Professors will find: * A bank of 100 legal analysis exercises at the ready, whenever students' analysis skills need attention or refinement * Exercises adaptable to any paradigm, that increase the depth of students' writing * Varied assignments that contain thoughtful sample answers and helpful annotations * Learning objectives and outcomes for each chapter * Assessment and grading rubric for each chapter * Go-to material ready for any class period * 100 exercises that can be used as is or expanded to fit professors' preferences * Sample annotated answers for 50 of the exercises that their students can use to assess their own performance * A Teacher's Manual for professors with sample annotated answers for the remaining 50 exercises and helpful variations on exercises * Online resources for ready access to authority Students will receive: * Tools students need to develop a keen understanding of rule-based and analogical reasoning
This concise text offers a straightforward guide to developing legal writing and analysis skills for beginning legal writers. Legal Writing and Analysis, Third Edition, leads students logically through reading and analyzing the law, writing the discussion of a legal question, writing an office memo and professional letters. The author then focuses on writing for advocacy and concludes with style and formalities and a chapter devoted to oral argument. The Third Edition features new material throughout on drawing factual inferences, one of the most important kinds of reasoning for legal writers, as well as additional examples on the book s companion web site. Among the features that make Legal Writing and Analysis a best-selling text : It tracks the traditional legal writing course syllabus, providing students with the necessary structure for organizing a legal discussion. The consistent use of the legal method approach, from an opening chapter providing an overview of a civil case and the lawyer s role, to information about the legal system, case briefing, synthesizing cases, and statutory interpretation. The emphasis on analogical reasoning and synthesizing cases, as well as rule-based and policy-based reasoning, with explanations of how to use these types of reasoning to organize a legal discussion. Coverage of the use of precedent, particularly on how to use cases. Superior discussion of small-scale organization, including the thesis paragraph. Numerous examples and frequent short exercises to encourage students to apply concepts. Many exercises focus on first-year courses and others focus on professional responsibility. The Third Edition offers: New material on drawing factual inferences, one of the most important kinds of reasoning for legal writers. Citation materials updated to cover the new editions of both ALWD and the Bluebook. Companion web site will include additional examples of office memos, opposing briefs, letters, and summary judgment motions.
Peter T. Wendel has taught academic success workshops at over thirty-five law schools throughout the country. In Deconstructing Legal Analysis: A 1L Primer, he provides a variety of time-tested techniques-including a unique model for visualizing legal analysis-to teach students how to think like lawyers and take law school exams. Deconstructing Legal Analysis: A 1L Primer features: a unique, visual pedagogical method that illustrates a relational analysis of facts, rules, and public policy an interactive approach that consistently encourages students to write down their answers to carefully guided questions a great teaching case, Pierson v. Post, showing how a layperson reads a case as compared to how a lawyer would read the same case useful templates and methods for legal analysis and essay-exam writing, such as IRAC and IRRAC exam-taking tips and guidance that emphasize flexibility, rather than a formulaic approach If experience is the best teacher, then Deconstructing Legal Analysis is an essential for academic success in law school.
This popular paralegal-specific text introduces the skills of reading and analyzing court opinions. It focuses on briefing cases and applying case law in legal memoranda and advocacy letters. This is a major revision with new cases and expanded writing chapters. ALSO AVAILABLE INSTRUCTOR SUPPLEMENTS CALL CUSTOMER SUPPORT TO ORDER Instructors Manual, ISBN: 0-314-46555-3
In recent years, the digitization of legal texts and developments in the fields of statistics, computer science, and data analytics have opened entirely new approaches to the study of law. This volume explores the new field of computational legal analysis, an approach marked by its use of legal texts as data. The emphasis herein is work that pushes methodological boundaries, either by using new tools to study longstanding questions within legal studies or by identifying new questions in response to developments in data availability and analysis. By using the text and underlying data of legal documents as the direct objects of quantitative statistical analysis, Law as Data introduces the legal world to the broad range of computational tools already proving themselves relevant to law scholarship and practice, and highlights the early steps in what promises to be an exciting new approach to studying the law.
This concise, accessible text provides law students with a way of organizing and thinking about their coursework and about the cases, laws, and regulations they confront every day.Among the features of this book: - based on the premise that despite the law's complexity, there are three primary questions that recur in different guises throughout legal practice: - Is there a law? - Has it been violated? - What will be done about it? - brings order to the multitude of legal issues that law students confront in the cases and materials they study - introduces the dynamics of legal argument - helps students recognize the basic questions posed in a legal dispute as well as the predictable reasons lawyers give for reaching one resolution or another - contains a helpful Glossary of Legal Terms and extensive index, as well as a list of suggested readings
This updated casebook serves a course in introduction to legal reasoning. It is designed to initiate students in the legal methods of case law analysis and statutory interpretation. In a course of this kind, students should acquire or refine the techniques of close reading, analogizing, distinguishing, positing related fact patterns, and criticizing judicial and legislative exposition and logic. Law students' introduction to law can be unsettling: the sink or swim approach favored by many schools casts students adrift in a sea of substantive rules, forms and methods. By contrast, the Legal Methods course seeks to acquaint students with their new rhetorical and logical surroundings before, or together with, the students' first encounters with the substance of contracts, torts, or other first year courses. This approach may not only be user friendly; it should also prompt students to take a critical distance from the wielding of the methods. In this way, students may avoid (or at least broaden) the tunnel vision that so often afflicts beginning law students. The fifth edition features a substantially revised chapter on statutory interpretation. It not only highlights recent Supreme Court decisions, but also confronts students with statutory texts to construe independently of judicial exposition. The chapter also includes new sections on ordinary meaning, the use of dictionaries and corpus linguistics, and temporal problems in statutory interpretation.
