Books for New Law Students
posted by Brannon Denning
Though I’m a little late to the game, I thought that I’d weigh in on Eugene’s thread about books to read before law school. My initial reaction is to advise folks to read any but books about the law, but as I was putting together my course materials, I thought about this book by Harvard law professor Richard Fallon. At many schools (not at Cumberland, though) constitutional law has become a first-year course; I always have students who find the subject confusing because they didn’t have any undergraduate courses in the Supreme Court or constitutional law and find the first several weeks rough going. Even excellent treatises like Erwin Chemerinsky’s can provide too much detail for these students. Fallon’s book is a great introduction to the Court and to the doctrine of American constitutional law.
June 5, 2007 at 12:15 pm
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Responses (3)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - June 5, 2007 at 2:48 pm
To take nothing whatsoever away from Fallon’s book (Chemerinsky himself gives his enthusiastic endorsement in a blurb), but more ambitious or venturesome students might benefit from Walter Murphy’s Constitutional Democracy: Creating and Maintaining a Just Political Order (2007). (And it’s less provincial or parochial, befitting our time.)
Alas, my own experience with students (non-law) tells me that they read only what is assigned to them (i.e., required) and even then not very diligently or thoroughly.
Jason - June 6, 2007 at 9:35 am
It’s not clear to me why students would have a harder time with ConLaw because of lack of background than with e.g. Contracts. Isn’t it part of the professor’s job, in either case, to provide that background?
Brannon Denning - June 6, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Patrick: I hadn’t heard of Murphy’s book, but look forward to getting a copy.
Jason: I try to do provide context and background through an introductory lecture on the Framing of the Constitution, etc. But some students confess lacking even a “Schoolhouse Rock”-level understanding of government or the Supreme Court. So, it’s nice to be able to give them some way to get up to speed.
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