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Rating: 
Summary: The hitchiker's guide to legal reasoning. A must read.
Review: I am currently a "1L" at a school in Washington DC.Professor Vandevelde introduces the reader to a brave new world: legal reasoning. As a first year law student, you will become intimately aquatinted with such creatures as Contracts, Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, and the peculiar little buggers known affectionately as Torts. But what you will need most on your adventure, you will find strangely absent: a map & compass. "Thinking Like a Lawyer," in my opinion, in simply that. Vandevelde's text effectively explains what legal reasoning entails, how it evolved into the beast that it is, and what makes it live and breathe. Further, T.L.A.L. is written in a very readable prose you will appreciate more and more once you've tasted a few clumsy judicial opinions. Most insightful and practical, in my opinion, are the final chapters, which illustrate the material by applying it to each of the first year's courses. I recommend this book, without reservation, to any now-or-future law student, and anyone curious about legal thought and application. By the way, I met Mr. Vandevelde once, in 1997, at a law schools' forum held at the World Trade Center. A sincerely friendly man.
Rating:
Summary: The hitchiker's guide to legal reasoning. A must read.
Review: I am currently a "1L" at a school in Washington DC. Professor Vandevelde introduces the reader to a brave new world: legal reasoning. As a first year law student, you will become intimately aquatinted with such creatures as Contracts, Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, and the peculiar little buggers known affectionately as Torts. But what you will need most on your adventure, you will find strangely absent: a map & compass. "Thinking Like a Lawyer," in my opinion, in simply that. Vandevelde's text effectively explains what legal reasoning entails, how it evolved into the beast that it is, and what makes it live and breathe. Further, T.L.A.L. is written in a very readable prose you will appreciate more and more once you've tasted a few clumsy judicial opinions. Most insightful and practical, in my opinion, are the final chapters, which illustrate the material by applying it to each of the first year's courses. I recommend this book, without reservation, to any now-or-future law student, and anyone curious about legal thought and application. By the way, I met Mr. Vandevelde once, in 1997, at a law schools' forum held at the World Trade Center. A sincerely friendly man.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent selection for future 1L's
Review: This book is on the reading list of the law school to which I have applied...reason enough for some prospective law students to read the book. Having now read the book myself, I shall try to offer some thoughts as to what I found between its covers.
[The use of the pronoun, his, in the following is a generic term for both male and female.]
The book is a very basic 'how to' introduction to legal reasoning. Legal reasoning being that process, which includes a lawyer's ability to identify relevant case law, to analyze both consistent and opposing policies, to develop his intuition to predict the political and theoretical leanings of the court, and his "ability to marshall as many policy arguments on the side of his client as possible". Each 'step' in this process is described in very readable prose with ample examples to demonstrate the thinking of a lawyer. Vandevelde breaks his chapters into mini-subsections; each subsection highlights a step along the legal reasoning process. The book, itself, is divided into three sections. Section one introduces the reader to legal reasoning; section two discusses the historical prospectives of legal reasoning complete with theories of high profile names in legal academia; and section three demonstrates the application of legal reasoning to four subject areas: contracts, torts, constitutional law, and civil procedure. Vandevelde includes in the back of his book a selected bibliography of both books and articles from which a hungry prospective 1L can fish for futher reading.
You need not be interested in attending law school to benefit from this book. It would serve just as well as a supplement for high school civics or history, for college, or for the curious-minded who wonder just what's going on when a lawyer starts to think!
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