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• The Law (Finance / Investing)

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  • Law & Economics by Robert Cooter and Thomas Ulen

Giving yourself a legal education

I’m kick-starting this list with some ChatGPT suggestions but I’ll modify it as I do more research.

1. Foundations of Legal Reasoning

   1. Thinking Like a Lawyer

      1. Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning

      2. The author repeats himself a lot in this book. A lot.

   2. The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law

      1. The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law

      2. This was rec’d by someone who gave ‘Thinking Like a Lawyer’ a bad review that I agreed with.

   3. An Introduction to Legal Reasoning

      1. An Introduction to Legal Reasoning

   4. 2015 - YouTube - YaleCourses - A Law Student's Toolkit

      • A Law Student's Toolkit

      • Introduction

      • Rules vs. Standards

        • A rule is when the law gives a specific value, like "$100". A standard is when the law says something like "fair market value".

      • Normative vs. Positive

        • Normative statements are "should" statements: "we should do X". Positive statements are "is" statements.

        • You cannot arrive at a normative conclusion given purely positive premises. That's known as Hume's law.

      • Ex Ante vs. Ex Post

        • Ex Ante is when you reason about what the law should be based on the effects of the law in the future. Ex Post is when you reason about what the law should be about an action that has already taken place.

        • Juries tend to reason ex ante, whereas judges tend to reason ex post.

        • People reasoning ex ante will tend to be more compassionate.

      • The Two-by-Two Box

        • Keep your eye out for situations in which three ways of doing things are listed, where the three ways are constructed from two binary distinctions. In those situations you may be able to construct a two-by-two box that reveals a less-frequently-used fourth way of doing things.

        • Example of the weird fourth way: A judge ruled that an old folks' community that had been built next to a ranch could force the rancher to move avoid having the community overrun with bad smells, provided that they compensated the rancher.

      • Default vs. Mandatory Rules

        • A law can either be a default rule or a mandatory rule.

        • If it's a default rule, it should be accompanied by "Altering rules" that dictate the necessary and sufficient conditions for altering the rule.

        • Every area of law is a mixture of default and mandatory rules.

        • Whenever you learn a new legal rule, ask whether it can be contracted around, and if so, how.

        • When setting defaults, the law tends to aim to set the default to what the parties would have hypothetically have contracted for, if they had expressly contracted.

        • The law will sometimes use "penalty defaults", which are designed to incentivize one or both parties to reveal information.

          • Ex: the default quantity in the UCC is zero.

   5. Law & Economics by Robert Cooter and Thomas Ulen

      1. Economics books | Economicsbooks Law&EconomicsbyRobertCooterandThomasUlen

2. Legal Writing and Research

   1. "The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation"

   2. "Legal Writing in Plain English" by Bryan A. Garner

   3. LEEWS

      1. Home

      2. The guy who created this went to Yale Law and was a Rhodes Scholar.

      3. I remember when I was seriously considering law school that this was the #1 recommended resource I found.

   4. Getting to Maybe

      1. I think I read through most (if not all) of this book and the main takeaway is that you have to consider the decision of a case as depending on which way the judge decides on a bunch of different issues. So you want to imagine the whole decision-process as being like a tree diagram, where certain issues only become relevant if the judge decides some earlier issue in a particular way. But you want to make sure you cover all of those issues and do it in an organized way that’s easy to understand.

3. Civil Procedure

   1. "A Student's Guide to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure" by Steven Baicker-McKee and others

   2. "Civil Procedure: Examples & Explanations" by Joseph W. Glannon

4. Contracts

   1. "Contract Law: Selected Source Materials" by E. Allan Farnsworth and others

   2. "Contracts: Examples & Explanations" by Brian A. Blum

5. Torts

   1. "Understanding Torts" by John L. Diamond, Lawrence C. Levine, and Anita Bernstein

   2. "Tort Law and Alternatives" by Marc A. Franklin and others

6. Criminal Law

   1. "Understanding Criminal Law" by Joshua Dressler

   2. "Criminal Law: Cases and Materials" by John Kaplan and others

7. Property

   1. "Property: Examples & Explanations" by Barlow Burke and Joseph Snoe

   2. "Understanding Property Law" by John G. Sprankling

8. Constitutional Law

   1. "The Federalist Papers" by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

   2. "We the People: Foundations" by Bruce Ackerman

   3. "Constitutional Law Stories" by Michael C. Dorf