 | Contracts (Law in a Flash) by Steven Emanuel
Buy new: $38.95 / Used from: $30.00 These are probably the most popular study aid among the least effective students. Flashcards build mnemonic recall, but they can't teach you a subject. You will pick up enough to pass any class, but no more.
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 | A History of American Law: Third Edition by Lawrence M. Friedman
Buy new: $16.50 / Used from: $4.90 Dry, academic, boring, and very very long. You won't be tested on the law in Plymouth Colony or Gold Rush-era California, so why bother learning about it?
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 | The Paper Chase
Buy new: $7.99 / Used from: $4.24 I hate this movie and I also think it's misleading in the modern world. Everyone remembers the scene with the abusive professor, but law school just isn't like this any more. If a teacher hands YOU a quarter to "call your mommy," you bring an administrative complaint. You might want to PRETEND to love this movie, though, to flatter your profs' misty-eyed nostalgia for the bad old days.
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 | Property (Casebook) by Jesse Dukeminier
Buy used from: $0.01 Reads the bits between the cases, skip the cases entirely and look their blackletter rules up in a Nutshell, Case Summary book or even the Internet. If you have a good E&E, you can even skip the bits between the cases. Seriously - my grades were inversely proportional to the amount of time I spent reading cases.
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 | The Buffalo Creek Disaster: How the survivors of one of the worst disasters in coal-mining history brought suit against the coal company--and won by Gerald M. Stern
Buy used from: $0.01 Supposedly this gives you an insight into the consequences of civil procedure to "real working class people." But if the ABA actually gave a damn about them, they would be on the test. They aren't, so save your own working class dimes for Glannon's Civ Pro E&E.
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 | Overcoming Law by The Honorable Richard A. Posner
Buy new: $22.65 / Used from: $0.57 Pop books by legal academics can be tons of fun, but they have no relevance to the law school experience. "Policy" debates are paid lip service, but generally looked down upon. Play dumb in class and ace the tests.
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 | The Critical Legal Studies Movement by Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Buy used from: $1.89 Normative legal thinking is probably the sort of thing your professors are into (hey, these are not party people). This can lull you into thinking norms are somehow relevant to your GPA. They aren't (in any traditional program, anyway). More dangerously, discussion of norms is actually INTERESTING, which can tempt you away from the mental drudgery that you need to be doing to succeed.
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 | The Supreme Court by William H. Rehnquist
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $3.00 Avoid all books by sitting (or recently dead) Supreme Court justices. They are usually ghost-written and always bad. Hell, if these people can't write opinions that make sense, why would you want to read their books? In a nobler era, justices of SCOTUS considered the writing of bestsellers just as improper as advisory opinions.
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 | Planet Law School II: What You Need to Know (Before You Go), But Didn't Know to Ask... and No One Else Will Tell You, Second Edition by Atticus Falcon
Buy new: $16.47 / Used from: $7.95 I read the first edition of this book before law school and found it every bit as misleading as it was helpful. The author's experience (at an unnamed top-10 school) was just not comparable to mine. He seems to be promoting Wentworth Miller's LEEWS course (in my view, a total waste of money) a bit too loudly.
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 | Law School Confidential (Revised Edition): A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience: By Students, for Students by Robert H. Miller
Buy new: $12.89 / Used from: $5.00 Simultaneously more reliable and less helpful than Planet Law School.
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 | An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law: Revised edition (The Storrs Lectures Series) by Roscoe Pound
Buy new: $22.00 / Used from: $1.36 This is one off of that list from the Harvard 1L that I wasted my time on. as I recall, she said something like: "Attend HARVARD law without reading Pound?! Impossible!" (Pound was HLS president in the 20's) In hindsight, it should have been obvious to me that this was pretentious nonsense. It's a great book, but will do nothing for your grades, your popularity, or your starting salary.
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