Where do you find black letter law? Forum

[cneu333]

.

[Mack.Hambleton]

Casebooks/supplements. It should be pretty obvious when you actually start classes

[UnicornHunter]

I wouldn't worry about black letter law so much, just focus on the holdings of the cases your prof assigns you. You can always pick up a horn book or an e and e later on in the semester.

The best sources of BLL are usually old outlines for the class.

[totesTheGoat]

What about for torts and con law?

Pretty much every area of law has a restatement, torts included. However the restatement IS NOT black letter law, nor is it law at all. It's a (very good) summary of what the law is, but you actually have to go to the statutes and regulations to get the black letter law.

To help you answer the question generally, black letter law is called black letter law because it is the black letters of the law. If you go to the statutes and look at some section, you're looking at black letter law. Google for 14U.S.C.89... you're looking at a black-letter law. White letter law is judicially "created" (it's better to say that it's judicially interpreted). These are the rules that you pull from cases and other resources when courts are interpreting the black letter law. As you can imagine, statutes don't cover every possible thing that could happen, so the courts rely on their own interpretations through precedent (white letter law) to fill in the gaps. As a student, you're spending 95% of your time in white letter law. Why? Because the black letter law is easy to find, but hard to apply. The white letter law is essentially the rules for how to apply the black letter law to a specific situation.

Based on what I wrote, hopefully it has become clear to you that the black letter law for Constitutional Law is the Constitution. The white letter law for con law is contained in a bunch of Federal Court cases (including the Supreme Court cases).

there any book where the black letter law for all the courses are just listed/explained?

That's a complicated question to answer. The answer is yes, there are multiple different types of books like that, but they're going to be almost entirely useless to you in 1L classes. Much of your confusion will clear up as you go through your classes.

For federal law, there is a book called the US Code (to call it a book is a massive understatement, it's a set with hundreds of volumes, each thousands of pages long). As you can imagine, you're not going to haul in a $20k set of books to a final exam. The reality is that you're going to be reading cases from your textbook, and many cases will talk about the statute or law that is involved. Then, once they establish that (insert statute here) is involved, they'll start talking about the white-letter doctrines and start citing to other cases as precedent.

[cmac2210]

For real?