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What is the Beer–Lambert law?

What is common content (textbooks, reference books etc) used in law?

  • I am interested in quite a few legal subjects, so general textbooks or those pertaining to the following subjects would be preferred (but not required, as other legal topics are more than welcome): international law, constitutional law, contract law, property law, intellectual property law, copyright law, company law, banking law, space law, tax law, antitrust law and environmental law. Philosophy and/or theory of law is a valid topic to suggest content on as well. Also, as I'm a U.S. citizen I'd prefer primarily U.S. law, although I'm more than willing to read of the law of other countries. It can be as advanced as you like as well, I actual hold a strong preference for advanced texts, such as those uses in Law School or popular for pre-law classes.

  • Answer:

    In law school we just use casebooks (books that have reprints of actual cases inside them). They don't give us "text books" in the traditional sense, where things are broken down for us. I would suggest that you look up "Law School Outline for <subject you are interested in>"on the internet. That will break down the "principles" that a certain case stands for and give you the case cite. Then, you can use the case cite to find the full text of the cases and read it just like a real law student.   Alternately, "Emmanuel's" and similar lines of study-aid materials for law students have outlines in them (which, again, break down the cases).   Lawyers also use books called "Restatements of <area of law>" and books we refer to as "Hornbooks" for specific topics like Torts, Contracts, etc., but these are EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE, multi-volume sets. Minimum investment, for a used set, would be on the order of thousands of dollars (and that doesn't include the update costs). If you are interested in that, I would visit my local law library. Also, if you have access to a student account on Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis, almost all of the "big" books are there.   The final recommendation would be to look at a Law Journal. These are published by various law schools. Some are generalized, but many have specific topics (my school, for example, had a Law Journal related to Natural Resource Law). The articles in the journals usually give great overviews of particular areas or detailed analysis of specific cases.   If you want the MOST BASIC breakdown of a legal area (such as "Business Law") there are some undergraduate coursebooks for this (I don't know any by name), but keep in mind that they are EXTREMELY general and NOT state-specific.

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In addition to 's great answer, I'd only add that there are also great books in the "Nutshell" series that I used when prepping for the bar in areas that I hadn't studied in law school.  They're a good light overview of the pertinent law, and you can use them to gauge your interest in diving deeper.  The titles are things like "Constitutional Law in a Nutshell" or "Tort Law in a Nutshell". Also, for your own personal purposes, I highly recommend using Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) for finding either case law or journal articles on topics that interest you.

Cliff Gilley

I see from your question details, you are open to reading non US law too. I'm going to suggest some English law texts, because the principles of English law form the basis of the law in Commonwealth countries like India, Australia and Canada as well as England itself. Plus English law has been influential in all systems that follow common law. I'm limiting my answer to three texts, which are kind of legal classics: Salmon on Jurisprudence - Jurisprudence is the philosophy of law and Salmon was a pretty important jurist that wrote an interesting and informative book on the subject. One of my favourite texts, it isn't too big or difficult and quite interesting to read. Chitty on Contracts - Pretty much the definitive treatise on contract law, this has been a favourite for English and Indian lawyers for its exposition of the principles of contract law. There is great deal of jurisprudence on this subject and Chitty nicely covers how contract law has evolved through the last few centuries. The Interpretation of Statutes by Maxwell - Lawyers are known to quibble on language and how particular words, phrases and sentences should be interpreted. For this lawyers learn the principles of interpretation as laid down by courts. This book is also quite well known as it nicely explains the different rules of interpretation with interesting case law. I could, of course, recommend Indian texts as well, but those would have more limited application.

Aakanksha Joshi

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