philosophy/legal reasoning v. black letter law Forum

[03152016]

in other threads, people say to focus on rules, black letter law
looking at practice exams i can see why
i have a q about this

at the urging of profs, i've been spending a lot of time thinking about legal reasoning, philosophy, history, etc
i'm wondering if all (or at least some) of the time i'm spending doing that would be better spent reading commercial outlines, learning the modern rules, playing with hypos, etc

for example, in civ pro we're starting with personal jurisdiction
so i'm spending a super long time thinking about decisions that don't reflect modern law
and i get the value in that and all
but in addition to that, should i start learning modern black letter law from emanuels/e&es or something
seems like that would fast forward the process

[ymmv]

in other threads, people say to focus on rules, black letter law
looking at practice exams i can see why
i have a q about this

at the urging of profs, i've been spending a lot of time thinking about legal reasoning, philosophy, history, etc
i'm wondering if all (or at least some) of the time i'm spending doing that would be better spent reading commercial outlines, learning the modern rules, playing with hypos, etc

for example, in civ pro we're starting with personal jurisdiction
so i'm spending a super long time thinking about decisions that don't reflect modern law
and i get the value in that and all
but in addition to that, should i start learning modern black letter law from emanuels/e&es or something
seems like that would fast forward the process

Do both / depends on the prof. You sound like you could benefit from reading Getting to Maybe btw. I would start with that. Should give you a basic sense of what to expect from exams and issue spotters and how to prepare for them.

[banjo]

For Civ Pro, Glannon's E&E is really all you need. The chapters give you the BLL and also discuss history and policy. The explanations are all excellent nuggets of legal reasoning. Same thing with Glannon's Torts E&E, which includes a great section on exam-taking toward the end. I only skimmed the casebook at the end of the semester to deepen my understanding.