Customer Reviews

Learning Legal Reasoning: Briefing, Analysis and Theory

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I am the author of Planet Law School: What You Need to Know Before You Go -- but Didn't Know to Ask. So, it might seem that John Delaney and I are competitors (and our books do have different publishers). But as I said in PLS, this book by Delaney is something every serious law student should get.

He presents beautiful examples of "case-parsing," which is what good legal analysis involves. In fact, he's brilliant, but without being flashy about it. To read his book is to rise above all the drudgery and the minutiae of the first-year of law school, and to see the beauty of what's involved in "Thinking Like a Lawyer." It is inspiring.

Yet, the book isn't some "ivory tower" fantasy on the Wonders of the Law. It's very down-to-earth, nitty-gritty, in the way you actually have to go about applying the law to the facts.

Too many prospective law school students are only interested in a "quickie" book that they kid themselves will help them adequately prepare for what lies ahead. They'll be sorry. Learning Legal Reasoning is NOT "Law School Lite." But it is a delight.

This is a must-read for anyone going to law school. It orients the beginning law student to the interweaving case law, statutory law, and policy that guide judicial opinions and teaches students how to extract the key elements from those opinions by way of the case briefing method.
At 130 pages, it is page for page, and pound for pound, one of the best law prep books you can find.
That said, don't think this book is a "quick read." Quite the contrary. To get the most out of this book, you must do some writing - "brief" all six cases presented and compare your work to the samples provided. Then highlight and note what you did right, and what you did wrong. Put the time and work in, and by your 6th brief, you will be amazed at how much progress you have made towards case briefing proficiency (one of the fundamental skills required of first year law students).

Whether or not you read anything else before starting law school, you will want to read this book. If you are really serious about preparing for law school (which you should be if you plan on getting good grades), you'll also need the other books in the Delaney series: "How to Do Your Best on Law School Exams," and "Learning Criminal Law as Advocacy Argument."

I just finished reading (working through I should say) Learning Legal Reasoning, and I'm amazed at how much I got out of it. You actually get practice applying skills that are explained in a very thoughtful way. I certainly can't produce briefs as good as the examples in the book, but it seems like I am about 70% there, which gives me confidence since I have quite a while before starting school. It's a fantastic introduction.

The immediate challenge in my law school experience was having to learn a a new way of reasoning and a method to make it work in the case format. I thought I was prepared for the volume of work but without a running start with these, even at a rudimentary level of competence, the work load became overwhelming. I recommend highly you avoid this situation, and it's easy to do. Buy Mr. Delaney's book and spend enough time prior to beginning law school making its contents the blueprint for your approach to learning. This the best advice I can give anyone entering law school or considering a law school education.

I read this book and worked through the problems the week before law school. I have to say that, after a week and a half, I feel very comfortable briefing cases. Yesterday I was crunched for time and did a complicated, short case in just 10 minutes. I hit on all of the main points, although I didn't have the wording or scope of the rule down (that takes more time than reading and highlighting the case).

I didn't write in this book, but I would suggest that you copy the first couple of cases in it and practice with multiple highlighters. I use Yellow for facts and to highlight something I know will be relevant in this first pass through. Then I go back and use orange for Issue/Holding (subsequently the rule), Blue for procedural history and judgment, pink for reasoning, and green for any dicta.

The things I didn't get from this book was the ability to spot dicta, this actually takes practice and I'm starting to get it.

Normally I would have given it 4 stars, but since there is nothing comparable and I have people asking me for advice, I think it is worthy of the 5 star.

As a side note, the professor has even sent me an email twice concerning some issues to watch (Sotomaier hearing and his free youtube videos).

This, along with "Getting to Maybe" (which is pretty complicated so I would read the intro and part 3 prior to the other two sections) are sure to help you understand what you should be learning in law school.

I read LLR before starting my first year of law school. It is a GREAT introduction to the law. Professor Delaney wrote this with the beginning law student in mind. It covers everything a neophyte needs to know (common law tradition, court opinions, law school briefing, etc.) in a workbook format. Professor Delaney also places great attention on the role of judges in shaping the law. This book is straightforward and easy to understand, yet provides the reader with all the tools necessary to attack your 1L classes. Worth every penny (and then some).

I'm going into my 2nd year and bought this book because I didn't get the grades I wanted as a 1L. I was a straight-A undergrad (English major) and scored 96th percentile on the LSAT, so I had high expectations of myself. The problem was, I didn't really "get" what my professors expected of me. This book nails it. I learned of it last week by desperately reading through law student Listmanias on Amazon when the last of my grades came through and I knew I needed some help if I wanted to do better next year. I had never heard of the book and don't know anyone who has read it-- it seems to be self-published, and I ordered it directly from his company; I don't think you'll see it in your school bookstore (I didn't).

I actually don't even know if his advice would resonate as well with me as a 1L as it does now, so I'd encourage other current law students looking to improve their grades to read it, especially if you're like me and struggling to understand why you didn't do better than you expected. But I definitely wish I'd read it last year-- my classes would have made a lot more sense. On the first page of Chapter 1, Delaney proposes a definition of "what law is" to explain what the first year of law school is about: "Law is a process of legal reasoning for decision-making about particular controversies." Believe it or not, I truly didn't get that my first year; I thought I just needed to "spot the issues." But there's a lot more to it than that, and I'm glad I found something that spells it all out in a way that none of my professors did. I've only just started reading so I can't report on all the content, but I wanted to encourage anyone just starting or looking to improve their grades to pick this one up before school starts. Good luck in school!

The reviews here that precede mine are all quite accurate. This is an outstanding primer on what you will face in the classroom.

Although this book will not teach you EVERYTHING about legal reasoning (by Professor Delaney's own admission and an impossible task for any one book, anyway), it will accomplish the formidable goal of cutting through the confusion many will face in their first weeks of reading cases.

You will, by your own practice and through Delaney's excellent examples in the book, learn how to extricate key facts, issues, and holdings from the types of court cases you will be reading throughout your first year. More importantly, you will learn to distinguish different types of legal reasoning/modes of legal arguments, especially in the highly original and entertaining conclusory chapter of the book. After all, one cannot learn lawyerly reason without learning the various lawyerly approaches to thinking.

Delaney's style is crisp and clear, and the overall presentation of the book is second to none. Delaney makes each chapter very palatable and clean with frequent section headings and explanations clear of lengthy legal citations (a necessary evil, for sure, but a plague in beginner books like these where readers need all the help they can just to get the key points) and aracane legalese. Even the way the book is bound and printed (it's a in paperback "textbook" form as opposed to a smaller, novel-sized book) helps one to quickly move through the book.

I have read a couple of "going to law school" primers and they both offered some helpful advice on briefing, legal writing, lifestyle, study habits etc. But, I'm the type of person who doesn't need strong reminders that I need to put a lot of time into the study of a difficult subject like law. When it comes to cutting through the muck and learning an indispensable key not just to law school, but to lawyering as well, this book is going to be hard to beat.

Read this book the summer before law school. You'll understand more and more of it as you go through your first year, and it will help you tie the first year courses together.

This was very helpful right before I started school. I went through some of the chapters a few weeks before and then went back to it when I was actually preparing my first briefs for class. If you use this book, you should have a good start on anything the prof asks.