Legal methods understanding and using cases and statutes

Synopsis

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. Professor Strauss focuses on the skills beginning law students need for using cases, statutes, and secondary materials in their education. He does so by following the development across time of American legal doctrines about product liability and workplace injury, caselaw and statutory, and of the institutions that created those doctrines, judicial and legislative. Along the way, students encounter not only the appellate opinions typical of law school teaching materials, but also lawyers' arguments and briefs, considerable stretches of legislative history materials, and a good deal of secondary literature -- largely, excerpts bearing on the continuing controversies over statutory interpretation.