The Practice of Law School: Legal Skills and Mental Health and Wellness

This book provides a succinct, yet comprehensive, overview of legal reasoning, covering both reasoning from canonical texts and legal decision-making in the absence of rules. It argues that there are only two methods by which judges decide legal disputes: deductive reasoning from rules and unconstrained moral, practical, and empirical reasoning. It analyses the interpretive methods used in legal decision-making.

This text provides a thorough background of the foundations of the Canadian legal system so that readers fully understand the laws and issues that may impact their work. Using this fundamental knowledge, readers will build key skills related to analyzing issues and facts, researching legal statutes and cases from various levels of court, creating and maintaining research plans, developing legal arguments, and transitioning their legal writing skills from classroom to courtroom.

How to Do Things with Legal Doctrine focuses on how to understand legal doctrine via a hands-on approach. Taking up the provocative invitations from the "New Doctrinalists," Pierre Schlag and Amy J. Griffin refine the conceptual and rhetorical operations legal professionals perform with doctrine--focusing especially on those difficult moments where law seems to run out, but legal argument must go on. The authors make the crucial operations of doctrine explicit, revealing how they work, and how they shape the law that emerges. How to Do Things with Legal Doctrine will help all those studying or working with law to gain a more systematic understanding of the doctrinal moves many of our best lawyers make intuitively.

This book presents the fundamentals of formal legal study by introducing the reader to legal problem solving and providing an understanding of the language of law. It also surveys the structure of the legal system in Canada, the sources of our laws and the distinction between public and private law.

Also available in print: KE289 H88 2009 LAW (Reserve).
Professor Hutchinson explores both the theoretical foundations of the Canadian legal system and the practical demands on law students today with humour and perceptiveness. His aim is to "provide the reader with insights and tips on how to cope with the routines of law school life and succeed in becoming a good law student and an even better lawyer.

The authors provide readers with practical commentary on effective legal research in the context of the complete legal problem solving process, and offer a structured framework to efficiently navigate paper-based resources and online databases.

provides legal students with the foundational support they need to learn how to effectively conduct legal research. Topics include identifying legal issues, analyzing a fact situation, and navigating through various print and digital resources.

This is a comprehensive guide to legal reading, reasoning, and writing that will help students learn how to use primary and secondary legal resources in making legal arguments; develop skills in legal reading, reasoning, and research; and write clear and effective legal memos, opinion letters, briefs, arguments, and pleadings.

Huhn demonstrates that there are five different types of legal arguments (based on text, intent, precedent, tradition and policy), and through myriad examples this book teaches law students, lawyers, and judges how to identify, create, attack, and evaluate each type of argument. The book contains useful advice and illustrations on how to weave the different types of arguments together to make them more persuasive. Huhn describes and explains how lawyers use logic, reasoning by analogy, and policy analysis in resolving progressively more difficult cases. The fourth edition of the book includes new chapters that illustrate policy arguments through the use of graphs and advises law students how to answer essay exam questions. The Core Knowledge content for this book will be available for use in fall 2023.