The Book Students Should Read Before Law School

Think Like a Lawyer: Legal Reasoning for Law Students and Business Professionals by E. Scott Fruehwald.

 

Law students need to start with the cognitive basics in order to develop into expert legal thinkers and writers. The early chapters of this book deal individually with the five types of legal reasoning--rule-based reasoning (deductive reasoning), reasoning by analogy, distinguishing cases and arguments, synthesizing rules (inductive reasoning), and policy-based reasoning, using self-correcting exercises.  Later chapters show how the five types of reasoning relate to the small-scale paradigm (how to organize a simple analysis) and how they can be used in legal problem solving.

 

Chapter One introduces the five types of legal reasoning. Chapter Two teaches students how to be critical and engaged readers and analyze cases, skills that they will need before they can learn the other miniskills in detail. Chapter Three concerns reasoning by analogy, which involves showing how a case is like a precedent case. Chapter Four examines rule-based reasoning, and how to apply rules to facts. Chapter Five involves synthesizing cases into rules, which is an important skill in establishing the law. Chapter Six investigates statutory interpretation. Chapter Seven brings the prior chapters together, by demonstrating how the different types of legal reasoning are fundamental to the small-scale paradigm. Chapter Eight fills in this paradigm by examining how to respond to opposing arguments and distinguish cases. Finally, Chapter Nine serves as a capstone to this book with its presentation of advanced problem solving and creative thinking. The appendices cover how the American legal system developed and canons of statutory construction.

 

One of the purposes of this book is to allow law students to learn legal skills independently. I want students to be able to get immediate feedback on their learning. Consequently, I have put answers to the exercises at the end of each chapter.

 

(Scott Fruehwald)