Ginsburg and Louk's Legal Methods: Case Analysis and Statutory Interpretation, 6th
Description
This updated casebook serves a course in introduction to legal reasoning. It is designed to initiate students in the legal methods of case law analysis and statutory interpretation. In a course of this kind, students should acquire or refine the techniques of close reading, analogizing, distinguishing, positing related fact patterns, and criticizing judicial and legislative exposition and logic.
Law students’ introduction to law can be unsettling: the sink or swim approach favored by many schools casts students adrift in a sea of substantive rules, forms and methods. By contrast, the Legal Methods course seeks to acquaint students with their new rhetorical and logical surroundings before, or together with, the students’ first encounters with the substance of contracts, torts, or other first year courses. This approach may not only be user friendly, it should also prompt students to take a critical distance from the wielding of the methods. In this way, students may avoid (or at least broaden) the tunnel vision that so often afflicts beginning law students.
The sixth edition makes significant revisions in light of major changes to important U.S. legal doctrines, as well as to address novel issues emerging in American law. These include revisions that anticipate a likely overruling of Humphreys Executor and an overhauled section on agency interpretations of law in the wake of Loper Brite's overruling of Chevron. The Sixth Edition also provides original discussions and excerpts from legislation addressing emerging legal issues related to new technologies (and technologically enhanced methods of legal reasoning), including legislation targeting deepfake images and videos; litigation over AI-powered voice assistants like Siri and Alexa; and the use of corpus linguistics and generative AI to assist in legal and statutory interpretation.
Law students’ introduction to law can be unsettling: the sink or swim approach favored by many schools casts students adrift in a sea of substantive rules, forms and methods. By contrast, the Legal Methods course seeks to acquaint students with their new rhetorical and logical surroundings before, or together with, the students’ first encounters with the substance of contracts, torts, or other first year courses. This approach may not only be user friendly, it should also prompt students to take a critical distance from the wielding of the methods. In this way, students may avoid (or at least broaden) the tunnel vision that so often afflicts beginning law students.
The sixth edition makes significant revisions in light of major changes to important U.S. legal doctrines, as well as to address novel issues emerging in American law. These include revisions that anticipate a likely overruling of Humphreys Executor and an overhauled section on agency interpretations of law in the wake of Loper Brite's overruling of Chevron. The Sixth Edition also provides original discussions and excerpts from legislation addressing emerging legal issues related to new technologies (and technologically enhanced methods of legal reasoning), including legislation targeting deepfake images and videos; litigation over AI-powered voice assistants like Siri and Alexa; and the use of corpus linguistics and generative AI to assist in legal and statutory interpretation.