How should students begin their legal education? Professor Peter Strauss's innovative materials build on a Columbia Law School commitment reaching back to Karl Llewellyn's Bramble Bush -- that legal education should start with orientation to the materials lawyers use and the institutions they deal with.In general, Legal Methods provides an introduction to the processes and the skills necessary in the professional use of case law and legislation, and to the development of American legal institutions. The casebook starts with materials from the first decades of American history, with relatively simple common law litigation, statutes and institutions, and with a country having to fashion its law for itself, largely through its courts. As the country industrializes, judicial styles change, statutes and their interpretation become more and more important, administrative agencies emerge. The materials largely explore the developing law on the related questions of product liability and

Ginsburg's casebook provides detailed information on legal methods and the tools for fast, easy, on-point research. Part of the University Casebook Series®, it includes selected cases designed to illustrate the development of a body of law on a particular subject. Text and explanatory materials designed for law study accompany the cases.

This title, a companion volume to The Law Making Process, is the definitive collection of cases and materials on the workings of the English legal system. Written by the foremost scholar in the field, it surveys how the law functions from the trial process (from pre-trial proceedings to the funding of trials), the role of the jury, and the legal profession. This edition takes account of all recent major legislative and judicial changes and updates the material on the established areas of the law. The book takes a 'law in context' approach, setting out those factors beyond the legal environment which impact on and inform the changes within it. The collection is required reading for all students seeking a thorough knowledge and in-depth understanding of how the English legal system operates.

The updated casebook, Manning and Stephenson's Legislation and Regulation, 2d, is designed for a first-year class on Legislation & Regulation, and provides a proven, ready-to-use set of materials for those interested in introducing such a class to their 1L curriculum. The book focuses on the tools and methods of interpreting legal texts, using Supreme Court and other appellate decisions as the primary texts, yet the note material gently introduces students to applicable insights from political science, history, economics, and philosophy. The book aims to familiarize students with tools and techniques that lawyers and judges use when crafting legal arguments in statutory or regulatory contexts, and to give students a sense of the larger questions of institutional design implicated by these interpretive questions.

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.

An examination of the British constitutional tradition exploring where it is now heading. It describes the constitutional changes over the last 30 years of the 20th century, and it maintains that, although no one seems to have noticed the fact, the traditional British constitution no longer exists