Legal Skills

This book was recommended as pre-course reading for the LLB. I'd already got the Glanville Williams one, which would have been fine if I was studying law in 1850, but this is SO much more useful in every respect. It's a manual of 'how to do everything' with plenty of substance and academic weight but written so that anyone can make sense of it.

Everything that you ever wanted to know about studying law but never got told (4/4 people found this helpful)

I love this book. I can't believe that I didn't have it before because it would have saved me so much grief. It has everything in it that my lecturers kept telling me that I ought to be doing but never seemed to think it was there job to tell me how I should be doing it. It is like referencing. I kept getting work back that said my referencing wasn't good enough but never once did anyone tell me how to make it better. It is the same with problem questions. Telling me that I didn't have the technique was never going to help me get it. But now this book tells me all the things that I need to know and I can see how much it is going to help me. It is like the sections on finding cases and articles. I've never been able to find things and I'd given up and thought 'if it's not in my textbook, I'm not going to read it' but the really simple instructions on searching gave me courage to try and now it is all so easy that I don't know what I thought it was a problem. If I'd had this book to do my first year legal systems course then I wouldn't have struggled nearly as much as I did. All you need as a student is someone to tell you how to do things but lecturers don't do that - they just expect you to be able to do it by magic and then have a go at you for getting it wrong. This book tells me how to do all sorts of things and now I am a much better student as a result. My only complaint is that I've had to get through two years of my degree without anybody telling me these things before. I mean, why not? This books makes it all so easy so surely someone at my university could have spelt things out for us a bit more. This should be compulsory reading for every law student everywhere.

I love this book (3/3 people found this helpful)

If you are studying law, you need this book. It is like an encylodpedia of all the things that you need to knwo to do well on your degree.

I'm just starting my second year and I didn't have this book last year and I didn't do that well. I tried but I found it hard to work out what some of the advice meant on doing essays and particularly problems. My exam results weren't the greatest and I did think about giving it up and doing something else. My dad said 'perhaps you're not just cut out for law' but my gran said that was nonsense and bought me this book. I don't know why she chose this one but i'm glad she did becuase it has made every single thing that I didn't understand totally and utterly clear as a bell. I've used the suggestions on problem questions to go back over my coursework from last year where i was getting marks like 48 and 50 and now I can see that it was so bad and I did so much wrong but I just didn't realise. I emailed my tutor for one of the subjects and told him that I'd been worried about my marks so I'd done some work over the summer and rewritten an essay and would he look at it and tell me if it was better and he said that it was a 'terrific improvement' and that it was now worth at least 15% more marks. I was made up because that would make it my best mark ever. So now all I have to do is follow the instructions in the book and I'll be getting marks up in the 60's for my coursework and be understnading what I have to do.

The reason I think this book is essential is that it is so clear that it gets rid of any doubt about what you have do so. There are step to step guides on essays, findings cases, writing and exams and all the other things that we need to know but nobody tells us.

The only legal skills book you'll need (5/5 people found this helpful)

I used the Law Express revision books by these authors before the exams last year and did better than I expected. Then I spotted this new one they've written - there is tons of useful stuff in here, not just on how to find the law (the guides to databases here are brilliant) and how to read it but most importantly how to use it in answering questions and how to write in a proper legal style. I've struggled with my writing and technique so far, but I can see where I've been going wrong - why my lecturers never told me any of this, I'll never know! I'm going to carry on reading it over the summer and I'm sure I'll do better next year. I'm not sure why they haven't made it look more like the others in their revision series, but if that's the only complaint I have, it must tell you how good the book is! Thank you!

Dr Emily Finch, Stefan Fafinski

Reader Reviews:

Magic - buy it! (3/3 people found this helpful)

Everything that you ever wanted to know about studying law but never got told (4/4 people found this helpful)

I love this book (3/3 people found this helpful)

The only legal skills book you'll need (5/5 people found this helpful)

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