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Have any of you guys/gals read Law 101: Everything You Need to Know About the American Legal System or The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking About the Law?

Are these books worth reading before law school? I saw them on a few pre-law recommended reading lists, but I am hesitant because reading about the law before law school seems like a bad idea.

reading about the law before law school seems like a bad idea.

Yeah, it's a bad idea. Pop-history-style books would be especially dangerous. Getting to Maybe is the credited response here because it's actually about doing well on law exams, and other than that I would not touch anything remotely related to the law before you step into the classroom. Read Dostoevsky or something.

The Lsat Airbender wrote:

reading about the law before law school seems like a bad idea.

Yeah, it's a bad idea. Pop-history-style books would be especially dangerous. Getting to Maybe is the credited response here because it's actually about doing well on law exams, and other than that I would not touch anything remotely related to the law before you step into the classroom. Read Dostoevsky or something.

I will pass on them then, but I will also pass on Dostoevsky. I never really took to his writing.

Thank you!

Agree with Lsat Airbender about those books, that entire category of “How-to-get-through-law-school” books. But how about something that never goes out of style, such as The Federalist Papers? Or H. L. A. Hart’s classic work of jurisprudence, The Concept of Law? Or a biography of a legal figure (let’s say Clarence Darrow) or judge (Brandeis, Brennan, Blackmun)? And then there’s Dickens’s Bleak House, with the immortal case of “Jarndyce and Jarndyce.”

Dipsychus wrote:Agree with Lsat Airbender about those books, that entire category of “How-to-get-through-law-school” books. But how about something that never goes out of style, such as The Federalist Papers? Or H. L. A. Hart’s classic work of jurisprudence, The Concept of Law? Or a biography of a legal figure (let’s say Clarence Darrow) or judge (Brandeis, Brennan, Blackmun)? And then there’s Dickens’s Bleak House, with the immortal case of “Jarndyce and Jarndyce.”

Those are fine. Completely irrelevant to going to law school, but if they float your boat, sure.

nixy wrote:

Dipsychus wrote:Agree with Lsat Airbender about those books, that entire category of “How-to-get-through-law-school” books. But how about something that never goes out of style, such as The Federalist Papers? Or H. L. A. Hart’s classic work of jurisprudence, The Concept of Law? Or a biography of a legal figure (let’s say Clarence Darrow) or judge (Brandeis, Brennan, Blackmun)? And then there’s Dickens’s Bleak House, with the immortal case of “Jarndyce and Jarndyce.”

Those are fine. Completely irrelevant to going to law school, but if they float your boat, sure.

But reading "Bleak House" will help you be the only person in class who chuckles at a professor's bad joke about "Bleak House," further cementing your reputation as an insufferable gunner. (It's me. I was the one who laughed at the jokes.)

IF IF IF I get the chance (and I might very well not), I am going to one-up cavalier by being ostentatiously cavalier with my classroom/section asides: “This particular issue does not lend itself easily to the Socratic elentic mode of disputation...” or “As Aquinas puts it in a little-quoted section of the great Summa...” or even “Dworkin (Ronald, not Andrea) was, as of course everyone knows, not quite comprehensive in his treatment of...”

I kid, I kid. But fun to think of this after the exhausting labors of the application process.

enz2103 wrote:

The Lsat Airbender wrote:

reading about the law before law school seems like a bad idea.

Yeah, it's a bad idea. Pop-history-style books would be especially dangerous. Getting to Maybe is the credited response here because it's actually about doing well on law exams, and other than that I would not touch anything remotely related to the law before you step into the classroom. Read Dostoevsky or something.

I will pass on them then, but I will also pass on Dostoevsky. I never really took to his writing.

Thank you!

1. Read Crime and Punishment
2. Throw away any of the "law books" you referenced
3. Enjoy your time before law school starts

The Lsat Airbender wrote:

reading about the law before law school seems like a bad idea.

Yeah, it's a bad idea. Pop-history-style books would be especially dangerous. Getting to Maybe is the credited response here because it's actually about doing well on law exams, and other than that I would not touch anything remotely related to the law before you step into the classroom. Read Dostoevsky or something.

Seconding LSAT Airbender here. Trying to learn the law from popular literature is something no one should do, especially not a 0L. Even trying to learn the law from, say, hornbooks is generally dangerous for 0Ls, even though legal hornbooks (unlike popular books) actually get the law right. This is because law school professors can (often) have idiosyncratic views, and 1L grades are based on how well you learn what the professor thinks/teaches, not how well you learn the "black letter law" as taught by E&E/Barbri/etc. 1L subjects may all be bar subjects, but few professors actually teach to the bar (that's what bar prep's for).