Product Description

The ability to read law well is a critical, indispensable skill that can make or break the academic career of any aspiring lawyer. Fortunately, the ability to read law well (quickly and accurately) is a skill that can be acquired through knowledge and practice. The sooner the student masters these skills, the greater the rewards. Using seven specific reading strategies, reinforced with hands-on exercises at the end of each chapter, this book shows students how they can read law efficiently, effectively, powerfully, and confidently. Reading Like a Lawyer is divided into 3 parts: * Part I introduces the reader to the fundamentals of legal reasoning upon which law-based reading builds; * Part II introduces the reader to concrete strategies for reading effectively in law school; * and Part III teaches strategies for reading law outside of the law school context.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100258 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 285 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781594600326
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review
"The author is an excellent writer and has produced a book suitable for introducing legal writing and reasoning in a variety of settings." --Bimonthly Review of Law Books

About the Author
Ruth McKinney is a professor of law at University of North Carolina School of Law.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction Exceptional law students, and exceptional lawyers, are expert readers. From the first semester of law school, fledgling lawyers commonly read hundreds of pages of dense, challenging law in a week, and thousands of pages in a semester. Later, in practice, lawyers read statutes, cases, and administrative regulations every day, decoding the words in the texts and reaching behind the words to the many possible meanings that could be attributed to the law they’re reading. Law students – and lawyers – who read law well are getting something from their reading that is not shared by those who read law less proficiently. Starting with the first days of class, what law students understand about the reading process itself has a major impact on how they read their assignments. How they read their assignments determines what they are able to get from those cases and statutes, what they are able to bring to class discussions and take from class discussions, and – ultimately – what they are able to learn for exams. How they read in law school, in turn, directs the path of their reading in the profession. Practicing lawyers who have developed sound reading practices in law school approach their analytical work with confidence, secure in the knowledge that they can read the law powerfully, passionately, and accurately. Put succinctly, these lawyers read with conviction, knowing they are reading like an expert. The good news is that the ability to read law like an expert is not a gift that you’re either born with or lack from birth. Students and practitioners have not been separated into the sheep and the goats prior to entering law school, relegated forever to green pastures or rocky cliffs. Rather, reading law like an expert is a skill that can be acquired by everyone with the curiosity, determination, and flexibility to adapt their prior reading skills to this new setting – and these skills can be acquired at any time. Once acquired and whenever acquired, the skill of reading law like an expert brings cascading rewards, enriching the reader’s understanding of existing law and enhancing the reader’s ability to create new paths to the law of the future. The purpose of this book is to teach you what the experts already know: how to read law-related material as efficiently, effectively, and powerfully as possible. There are three sections to the book: Part I introduces you to background information you need to know about the study and practice of law to get in the reading game. If you are already familiar with the structure of law school and the fundamentals of legal logic, you may choose to go directly to Part II. Part II focuses on casebook reading, the kind of reading that dominates the first years of law school. This second section introduces seven specific reading strategies, captured in the acronym E.M.P.O.W.E.R., that are common to all expert reading, and explores how law students can apply these strategies in the context of their casebook reading. Part III of the book moves outside of the casebook context, exploring how students and practitioners can read statutes and unedited cases accurately, confidently, and efficiently. There is a section of Appendices: Appendix A gives you a chance to test your baseline reading speed; Appendix B introduces a case-reading checklist that beginning students can use to develop healthy casebook reading habits; Appendix C introduces an advanced case-reading checklist to help successful students speed up their reading once they’ve developed sound habits. Appendix D offers a reading list for those who would like to explore the topic of legal reading in greater depth.You will find useful supplementary material on that website, including some of the responses I thought about as I wrote the Practice Exercises at the end of each chapter. Comparing my responses to your own may help you gain confidence as you develop your legal reading skills. At their core, both law study and law practice are dependent on reading. If you learn to read law efficiently and effectively, you will be well on your way to achieving excellence in the study and practice of law. It is my hope that what you learn from this book will help get you started on the right page.

Customer Reviews

Mandatory Reading For Law Students -- Critical Reading Curriculum Instructor, Phillip G. Hubbard Law School Preparation Program
When I was asked to teach the "critical reading curriculum" at The University of Iowa's Phillip G. Hubbard Law School Preparation Program, I researched methodically to find a text that would be "on point" as they say in the legal world. Ruth Ann McKinney's Reading Like A Lawyer is just that. Written in an engaging and easy to read style, McKinney teaches prospective and current law students all the skills necessary to successfully understand a variety of legal documents. These skills include learning to brief a law case and analyze casebook law, learning how to decipher the complexities of analyzing statutes, and discovering how to read legal cases outside a law classroom's casebook. The strength of McKinney's text is that she provides you with real edited casebook cases, real-world statutes, and real non-casebook (i.e. unedited) cases, ready for the reader to read first-hand. McKinney then supplies the student with a list of questions to help them hone valuable legal reading skills. After a student finishes learning how to read a case, and then reads it, a highlighted and annotated version of the same legal case appears, wherein McKinney demonstrates the areas in the case that are important and should have been identified as important by the reader. Reading these annotated cases is akin to entering the mind of an experienced high level attorney as s/he reads and analyzes a case. When I brought McKinney's Reading Like A Lawyer to the attention of the Dean of Students at The University of Iowa's School of Law, Dean R. Chayce Ramey, I was delighted to learn that he often recommends McKinney's text to law students, and that he himself refers to it when teaching legal skills. I was surprised to see so few reviews of McKinney's text, and I suspect part of the reason is that this is one book many competitive law students would like to keep a secret. Well, the secret's out of the bag -- McKinney's book is an outstanding must read for all prospective and current law students!

Dr. Ervin Nieves
Critical Reading Instructor,
Phillip G. Hubbard Law School Preparation Program
The University of Iowa

OK, but certainly not "Phenomenal"
If you are already a good reader, then this book probably won't help you much. There are some basic tips which help to orient beginners to some of the lingo, style, and format of (particularly) legal opinions...which are OK but something which isn't surprising/new/presented in an amazing fashion.

The heart of the book appears to be getting people who are poor or so-so readers to realize that reading is *the* primary tool used by law school students and good lawyers, and gives prescriptions for trying to make you a more engaged readers. McKinney teaches at a law school, and so can be said to "have done well for herself," so her ideas may be helpful...but if you're already a good reader, you already are engaged, etc. Her emphasis on being an active reader may be just what you are already doing; it seems to be (again!) directed towards readers who are not careful to actually understand what they read, who gloss over words/phrases they don't know, who don't "get" the importance of transitional phrases which clue the reader in to important clarifications, qualifications, etc.

She has some exercises which may or may not be helpful, too, to try to stimulate you to use her system of reading.

Besides pushing a more active reading, McKinney has an emphasis on being generally involved in one's law school education; part of what is said is to go ahead and make provisional assumptions/hypotheses/guesses about what is going on, being willing to update them in the light of new information, etc. Though she is supposedly helping you to use your time better, some of it is a bit overboard and certainly extra work for very little bang: for example, she wants you to guess and write down what some brief will be about, rather than just reading it and finding out...

Also, she seems to think that she has discovered something amazing when she asks readers to visualize, e.g., the facts of the case; she puts a huge emphasis on bringing one's own experiences to the task of reading, apparently in an attempt to get people more motivated/invested in what they are doing. If McKinney had taken the time to understand the current theory of ways that we learn--visual, aural, tactile--then she would have presented this better and also with a little more humility. She is a visual learner, apparently, so this method worked for her; you should use what works for you.

Her "method" uses an acronym which has to work too hard. Several letters stand for more than one word/idea, and "E.M.P.O.W.E.R." is just too much like people writing down "knowledge is power" without actually working to have the knowledge.

As you might have gleaned from the above, one of her unspoken goals appears to be just encouraging law school students to "hang in there," that they *will* "get it" if they apply themselves, and not to be afraid of having an opinion which might not conform to what others think, etc. In short, ask lots of questions, read actively, participate a lot, and you'll get more out of being a student.

Becoming a lawyer
I bought this book for my wife as she was getting ready to start law school in the fall of 2007. Prior to buying this book, she had taken a summer enrichment class aimed at developing the skills necessary to succeed in her first year in law school. My wife read this book after finishing her summer class and before the actual start of her real classes; she did this following one of her professor's advice. Well, she is glad she did! Everything she had done in class was referred to in the book, plus further tips on how to be on top on her law school assignments. So, if you have decided to go to law school, this is the book you need to ace your first year!!
I, myself, am a lawyer too, and I know what a head start she has accomplished.