Greetings, Veeky Forums.
I'm starting law school, in a week or so, with the aspiration to become a lawyer, in the future.
I was wondering if there are people knowledgeable in this field, that could point out some useful books/literature, so that I can get more acquainted with the subject.
Thank you for taking your time to read this.
I'm a 3L, you need to chill.
Go on a vacation, do some drugs. You will be under a lot of stress in two weeks. Spend the time you have now in the most relaxing way possible.
Good luck. Where did you get into?
Law, Legislation and Liberty by Hayek
Democracy in America by Tocqueville
You also need regular philosophy, so 9 volumes of History of Philosophy by Fredrick Copleston, as it is impossible to understand law as a theory without first understanding where it is coming from.
Go to the library and find textbooks + supplements for the following topics: Torts, Civ Pro, Contracts, Property
Look them over, then find important cases and try to brief them.
See if you can work out the logical structure of the decision and also the rule(s) at issue
I've heard reading One L is a rite of passage for going into law
Habermas and Hans Kelsen
Haha, I've been having a half-year vacation, of sorts after dropping out of dentistry university, so I've had plenty of time to rest, to be honest.
I was born and raised in Macedonia, so I'm attending Macedonia's "Justinian I".
Thank you for the suggestions, I will look them up online, see if there are any PDFs that I can download and skim over.
Read your assigned reading and nothing else. Read everything you're told to twice and make notes. Read nothing but assigned readings. You don't need a background in the humanities to succeed in Law, you need to read your fuckhuge law textbooks and nothing else.
>Macedonia's "Justinian I".
I'm afraid that is a person and not a law school dude.
My diary, desu.
The Art of the Deal.
Just get used to reading a lot of legal opinions.
This is terrible advice.
Professors teach their classes a certain way, with emphasis on certain teaching styles. Don't muddy the waters by showing up with some vague understanding of torts. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Read the philo if you want, but seriously, don't waste time or confuse yourself with the casebook.
This is actually terrible advice.
The Constitution
im in law school and have 0 intention of being a lawyer. the only law jobs that seem fun are personal injury and divorce.
working for a firm is my nightmare
ukim.edu.mk
You were saying, dude?
Platon - The Republic
Aquinas - Summa Theologicae
Locke - Two Treatises of Government
Rousseau - Contrat Social
Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan and also Behemoth
Good luck OP. These are the essentials of legal/political science.
>You don't need a background in the humanities to succeed in Law
Bitch, Law is the mother of all humanities.
Start a solo firm and only work cases that involve the combination of personal injury and divorce!
John Grisham
The patrician's choice
Pleb's*
And who the fuck are you?
OP is about to undergo massive stress and an enormous workload. He needs to enjoy what time and innocence he has left.
One of Veeky Forums's many in house attorneys. I'm a partner and I head up the Veeky Forums litigation department.
Saved
Law student seconding
None of those are essential unless you mean studying the law as a philosophy rather than as a practice. Indeed 99% of practicing lawyers and judges will not have read all those "essential" books.
>Law is the mother of all humanities.
That would be philosophy.
Where are you studying at? What year? LSAT scores and undergrad GPA?
I mean I would have no problem practising law after graduation but I'd like to get into legal philosophy as well.
I thought philosophy majors made good lawyers? What's wrong with reading philosophy for law school?
>What's wrong with reading philosophy for law school?
The other Law Students who read nothing but their textbooks will get better marks than you and take all of the jobs, leaving you unemployed despite your superior foundational knowledge which nobody gives a shit about and you would never be able to exercise unless you were to be appointed to your country's highest law court.
this sadly.
Carl Schmitt to be honest.
>I'd like to get into legal philosophy as well
please kill yourself
they score high on the LSAT because analytic autism requires a similar skillset to standardized texts
>The other Law Students who read nothing but their textbooks will get better marks than you and take all of the jobs
t. brainlet
Most kids at law school are grinders and not that smart. If you go to an upper-tier T14 getting a 'good' job is a cakewalk anyways- obviously you don't. Also, foundational knowledge is useless even if you're a Supreme Court Justice. Just call the Constitution a 'living document' and steal a few key phrases from whatever the last progressive majority opinion was while making dubious appeals to the 14th Amendment.
There's nothing wrong with the philosophical aspect of legitimacy, law, legality. You are a simpleton if you think so.
legal 'philosophers' are a joke
anyone who seriously pursues it as a career is a pseud parasite
this.
t. An actual pseud parasite
Drop out now. Law school is the biggest waste of money, unless you're attending a top-tier law school.
>Schmitt
>Locke
>Smith
>Marx
>jokes
>Marx
>Not a joke
rode the spirit unlike you
Veeky Forumsigation ffs
And now commies ride the bread lines.
Learned Hand
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
ת
ו
ר
תורה
What?
>thread on Law
>post in Hebrew
>what could it be
What do you fucking think it is
Something Jewish obviously. I'm afraid I don't speak the language though.
Law students, and students who want to be law students, are mostly odious human beings.
t. an actual odious human being
What did law students do to you user? You can confide in us.
I wouldn't even go that far. They are mostly middlebrow nouveau riche type people who think being a lawyer is prestigious or puts them in some kind of social elite.
80% of law school kids are only doing law school because they have to do something or daddy will be disappointed. Semi-rich kids with nothing else to do.
I was in skopje one time and this gypsy kid kept headbutting me in the legs when i refused to give him money. my friend who is a local chased him away. good times.
Scott Turow's One-L is a good read that offers a realistic impression of what the first year of law school is like.
The way to succeed in law school is to outline what you learned after each class, the same day, then edit that outline on the weekend. And do this progressively for each week of the course, and each month, etc. That way you will have internalized the material, and prepared yourself as best you can for the all-or-nothing three-hour exam that your grade for the class is typically based on -- you will be prepared to "spot the issues," and analyze them.
Most of the other books people are mentioning, including the one book I mentioned - even if they're great books, like The Federalist Papers - are not going to help you succeed in your first year of law school.
What *will* help you succeed is to diligently, day by day, week by week, and month by month outline the course.
To further clarify, reading a general book about contracts - whether a nutshell, an outline, or whatever - will not necessarily and likely not at all help you to master the *particular approach to contracts* which your first-year professor takes. Which is the approach you need to master to get a good grade, with all the benefits that accrue to getting good grades in terms of seeking employment.
AND, I might add, will provide a necessary step in acquiring some of the mental discipline which the successful practice of law most definitely requires.
Another aspect to mental discipline is to avoid majoring in the minors -- getting caught up in fascinating but ultimately unimportant time-sucks that take you away from time better spent focusing on the issues the instructor is focusing on. Eg, in doing side reading during Contracts, I became overly fascinated by (i) the history of Karl Llewellyn and the drafting of the UCC and some of the minutiae involved in that, and (ii) the philosophical differences between Corbin and Williston on the parol evidence rule.
In retrospect, this was not time fruitfully spent. My Contracts prof, with whom I had a rather good relationship, advised me after the exam that I had a fascinating disquisition on (i), but failed to address in sufficient depth another, more important issue, and thus received a lower grade than I might otherwise have gotten.
Thanks for all of this.
bump
you dont become one of those guys by studying philosophy of law at law school.
if you do what he says you have no soul
>My Contracts prof, with whom I had a rather good relationship, advised me after the exam that I had a fascinating disquisition on (i), but failed to address in sufficient depth another, more important issue, and thus received a lower grade than I might otherwise have gotten.
im so glad im not you
Oh and when did you become a legal philosopher? Where did you go to law school?
If that is the case then a soul is overrated. This also assumes the existence of souls.
I'm so glad I'm not a brainlet like you.
How are classes at the school of resentment going user?
>Oh and when did you become a legal philosopher?
Philosophy of Law doesn't interest me in the slightest. It's a joke discipline whose practitioners can't admit that 'legality' is merely the whim of whoever holds coercive force in any given context. If you want to understand how laws function in practice you should study Law & Economics.
Also fyi you don't have a 'major' in law school. It's a JD mill. Philosophy of Law is typically a single elective course, and something that would be better pursued as a Philosophy grad student
>Where did you go to law school?
T14. You can take that as solemnly or as dismissively as you'd like.
>If that is the case then a soul is overrated. This also assumes the existence of souls.
cringe
>I'm so glad I'm not a brainlet like you.
good luck with law school, big brain
>school of resentment
this doesn't mean what you think it means
Doesn't mean he shouldn't read them dumbo.
>It's a joke discipline whose practitioners can't admit that 'legality' is merely the whim of whoever holds coercive force in any given context.
I see you have not gone through law school. That was already debunked in Nuremberg.
>No Amartya Sen
>No John Rawls
>No Robert Nozick
>No Ronald Dworkin
>No Kenneth Arrow
Kill yrslf famlam.
Why are you even posting? I never said not to read philosophy in your free time; I said that going to law school with the intention of becoming a 'legal philosopher' is goofy. If your life's ambition is to talk at students about the 'morality' of torts I legitimately feel bad for you.
lol
>dworkin
>the decision is always right and the only possible one
Fuck you, brah.
>Legal philosophy is about the ethics of torts
t. Marxist radical who doesn't know anything about legal philosophy and hates lawyers because they "perpetuate the establishment"
follow the reply chain dumbass
Do you think people at SCOTUS chairs ignore philosophy of the law? It's important even when judging the invididual law in the individual case.
>ideology rules everything around me
supremecourt.gov
You btfo'd yourself.
>thinking that had nothing to do with ideology
>t. scored 450 on SAT reading section
>t. still remembers what he scored on the SAT reading section.
God it must be nice being such a childish fool.
this
>Where are you studying at? What year? LSAT scores and undergrad GPA?
Not an american but final year.
>I mean I would have no problem practising law after graduation but I'd like to get into legal philosophy as well.
Just know that these are too very separate things and will not intersect unless you start getting to the highest level of the judiciary.
>I thought philosophy majors made good lawyers?
People who have good analytical skills, attention to detail and can read and digest vast amounts of information make for good lawyers. Studying philosophy will not help with this even though people who are good at philosophy will have the same skills.
>What's wrong with reading philosophy for law school?
Well partly - but I would argue that the problem mentioned there will only be a big thing if you give it anything more that 10-15% of your study time and effort (assuming you have hobbies and friends).
Philosophy for me was more about conditioning myself to deal with the abusive field and to prevent the endemic burn out and mental brake downs rather than learning the origin of laws and the legal philosophy that governs the practice.
Good post.
Undergrad student here
Wondering if I should be recording/transcribing my lectures? Or is that a waste of time at this stage of the game. Would the time be better spent reviewing lecture slides/readings?
Focus on slides and readings desu.
Where are you from then? What is Law School like in your country?
Any law graduate can find work as a solicitor, my sister graduated top of her class as a barrister and struggled for years despite her dedication and technical skill, only now that she got in he European court she's got a career
The fall by camus
Romans