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.

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.

Mastering Legal Analysis and Drafting seeks to emphasize the fundamental structure and methods of legal drafting, which, the authors contend, are grounded in a surprisingly few, elemental rules and techniques of legal analysis and deployment of legal authorities amid relevant facts. It is designed to help the novice legal drafter identify those elemental rules and techniques and show how they are used to prepare effective legal writing in different formats, most of which share common elements and structures. The book begins with a discussion of legal analysis, followed by a discussion of general drafting principles and rules, and then proceeds to apply these concepts in the following chapters to specific forms of legal writing including:client letters, demand letters, research memoranda, motions and supporting documents, appellate briefs, contracts and instruments, and legislation. It closes with a chapter on "writing to build a record" that reprises the other chapters and highlights the key concepts.

Indeed, if the legal field is to be understood as instrumental to democracy's cohabitation of individuals, research on dispute resolution remains pre-eminent as a means to understand how individual views differ and how different views can be overcome. As a central part of conflict analysis, such research would assist an interdisciplinary quest for a dynamic understanding of democracy and law. It would focus on how different individuals with different conceptions of the good can live together in their community, in their world. Scientific research in the fields of communication, economics, psychology, history, political theory and philosophy, to name but a few, would side with legal theory in a shared ambition to analyze the way individuals are affected by their views as well as by their institutions, in order to provide society with a dynamic means to solve conflicts and enhance citizenship or legal awareness. Such research necessarily coincides with empathy-oriented education, directed towards an understanding of different conflict positions and the related comprehensive or non-comprehensive views affecting them. An affective education, analyzing all affective mechanisms of societal or interpersonal disputes and their legal or alternative resolution. A clinical education, offering an interactive simulation with regard to these positions and their affective impact, demonstrating how individual views continuously affect the positions taken, how disputes are affected by the legal or other institutions that attempt to solve them, and how the effectiveness of legal or other solutions to the conflict at hand depends on a practice of affective legal analysis. Thus legal and civic education, by way of affective narration and clinical simulation, join affective legal analysis in its endeavor to provide society with a similarly affective and non-rationalizing approach of legal awareness.

The right-to-die debate has gone on for centuries, playing out most recently as a spectacle of protest surrounding figures such as Terry Schiavo. In Deconstructing Dignity, Scott Cutler Shershow offers a powerful new way of thinking about it philosophically. Focusing on the concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life, he employs Derridean deconstruction to uncover self-contradictory and damaging assumptions that underlie both sides of the debate. Shershow examines texts from Cicero’s De Officiis to Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to court decisions and religious declarations. Through them he reveals how arguments both supporting and denying the right to die undermine their own unconditional concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life with a hidden conditional logic, one often tied to practical economic concerns and the scarcity or unequal distribution of medical resources. He goes on to examine the exceptional case of self-sacrifice, closing with a vision of a society—one whose conditions we are far from meeting—in which the debate can finally be resolved. A sophisticated analysis of a heated topic, Deconstructing Dignity is also a masterful example of deconstructionist methods at work.

The right of peoples to self-determination seems well-settled and covered extensively in the scholarly record. Yet old Trotsky’s question – of whom is this right and to what? – haunts the self-determination literature. Somehow almost every work on it begins with an expression of puzzlement. This right turns out to be elusive, underdefined in its scope and content, paradoxical in almost every aspect. This book mobilises all powers of critical legal theory and modern philosophy to take the bull by its horns. Instead of ironing out the paradoxes, it aims to finally give them a proper explanation based on the concept of exception.