Customer Reviews

Torts and Compensation: Personal Accountability and Social Responsibility for Injury (American Casebooks)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

As a first year law student, nobody told me about that some of the books that we are asked to read are not meant to be useful learning aids. I bought this book and did my readings faithfully and diligently for the first couple months of school. Please, do not make the same mistake that I did!

Don't use this book as your primary method to learn torts unless you enjoy wasting time and don't want a life outside of the dreary halls of your law school.

The book is incredibly inefficient. It introduces you to concepts and details of areas of tort law at a snail's pace. You'll spend 3 or 4 hours of reading and briefing cases to pick up what you could have learned in 15 minutes of reading a Casebrief, Gilbert, or Emanuel outline. The explanations between cases is mediocre, posing more questions than answers. And the book does not provide answers to the problems and hypotheticals that it asks.

As a first year law student, the professors will decieve you and tell you that you will learn more if you do all of the readings, brief the cases, and participate in the Socratic Method learning style. Big lie! In reality, volumes of scholarly pieces have been devoted to exposing the myth of the Casebook/Socratic/Langdellian method of education for the inefficient joke that it is. But your professors will ask you to be a good little law student and read your Torts and Compensation, and brief your cases.

If you make the mistake of believing them, like I did, you will find yourself studying over 50 hours a week and will only have a medicore understanding of the material.

Ignore your professors' mad rants, buy an outline book, spend 15 hours a week studying instead of 50, and have a masterful understanding of the material. Part of this strategy I outlined is ignoring this textbook. It's tailor made for the antiquated inefficiencies of the Socratic Method and all of the time wasting that goes along with it.

If your professor assigned this book to you, you probably don't have a choice and MUST buy it. If you value your time, AND want to learn torts successfully, buy a book that is keyed to this textbook and has summaries of all of the cases (in case you get called on). Look at a hornbook or a Gilbert or Emanuel outline to get a framework of Tort law. This textbook is a big waste of time. There are better, faster, more complete ways to learn torts. This book is just a detour, a weapon that first year law professors will use to make your first semester rites-of-passage as difficult as possible.

Like many students in law school I had to read this book for my Torts class. Our professor did an excellent job with a fairly mediocre book by explaining the concepts and cases at length (and thus eliminating the need for me to go and buy supplemental materials). There are sections of the book that you can gloss over (and this is precisely what our professor had us do) unless you really need to know more about tort wars or statutes of limitations etc. This book is something of a necessary evil for learning torts, but as a reference book it doesn't really cut it. If you want a more clear and concise book that you can read or peruse or use as a reference then this is not the book for you. It's strictly a textbook, but one that does the job. It could have been done better and without the typos (surely a computer spellchecker could have been used as this is the 21st century for crying out loud!). I'll be selling my book back this coming semester simply because I don't think there is anything I need from this book that I can't get elsewhere and for the record I actually enjoyed learning about torts. I would thank my excellent professor more than this book though.

I concur with my fellow reviewers that this Casebook contains more typos and grammaticla errors than a first-grader's book-report!! If your Torts prof is excellent (and mine was) such editorial problems won't keep you from getting a good grade. But, to be sure, buy the Examples and Explanations by Glannon and a good commercial outline to supplement this POOR casebook! Finally, I wholeheartedly agree with one of the reviewers who indicated that this casebook is VERY much biased towards the plaintiff's bar and against defendents, businesses, or "the MAN".

I am using this book currently in my torts class. The content is solid however the editing is poor. Grammatical errors can be found throughout the text.

I feel really sorry for the student assistants that got credit in the front of Dobb's book for their careful editing. This book has more typos in it than any thing I have ever seen. And if Torts law was not hard enough to understand, having to work within Dobbs sorry typos makes it that much harder. Content wise, the book just does not lay out Torts in any logical order. It is just too hard from this book to pull out what the rule is and whether a case represents the majority view or a minority. Defense arguments against recovery tend to get far less coverage than the plaintiff viewpoint: That much is obvious from the books' subtitle. Overall, it is required that you use a study supplement with this book. I recommend "Understanding Torts" by Larry Levine, et al. Don't buy this book unless some sadistic professor is forcing you too.

I am astounded at the previous reviews of this case book. The typos, though present, do nothing to detract from it's purpose - to deliver brief and interesting cases that explain torts in a sensible and logical order.
This book is a pleasure to read, and it CERTAINLY is not diffcult to understand. It is in fact the clearest and most vibrant law text I've encountered. Students having trouble finding the majority opinion need to read the whole case; those not understanding the order of the tort law presentation need to read the entire book.

There are no typos due to the way that legal jargon is explained; moreover, this version is great for redacting cases down to the essential elements of each tort. So you can avoid reading a 20 page case to about a 5 page case - I like it.

Thought I could save $100 by getting this 5th edition, plus Casenotes for the 6th, not the 6th edition textbook as required. But ended up seeing that there was enough of a difference that I was losing much of the substance of the course as taught, and needed to get the required edition. Happily also found that the 6th edition, in addition to having about 10-15% newer cases, that with slightly larger print, better page contrast, etc. it seems much easier to read, and appears to have concepts more clearly organized/spelled out.
From other reviews it seems this Dobbs book is not the easiest choice for organizing thoughts and learning tort rules.
But if it's Dobbs that your course requires, get the newer edition, not this one. I actually have found the 6th to be a pretty decent textbook.

This book really is badly edited. There are entire pages that lack punctuation. It's difficult enough to master torts without struggling through the basic grammar. The book also is very case heavy and explanation light. Those reading it had better hope for an excellent torts prof!

If you must use this book for class, save yourself a lot of headache and get Emanuel's Outline or flashcards on the subject or Gilbert's Outline. This book is very difficult reading compared to my other other law books. Law professors should really stay away from it.