Details
- This 1930's classic is a thorough and honest representation of what law school is like.
- Karl Llewellyn takes students inside the classroom by providing factual examples, detailed information, and practical explanations of what law students will encounter on their journey through law school.
For over 70 years, prospective and enrolled law students have been assigned to read a text that prepares them what they are about to encounter. That text is Bramble Bush.
This classic answers questions that all students have when starting law school, and virtually takes them inside the classroom like no other text. Karl N. Llewellyn offers understanding on the context of law, techniques on how to study the law without losing heart, and how to engage in the material within the classroom.
The Bramble Bush is required reading at many top tier law schools and is recommended by many Law School Deans for the insight it provides to new students. An outgrowth of Professor Llewellyn's introductory lectures at Columbia University School of Law, Bramble Bush continues to be the best introduction to the study of law for both potential and enrolled law students.
This edition includes an introduction by its editor Steve Sheppard, the William H. Enfield Professor of Law at University of Arkansas's School of Law. He is a faculty adviser to the International Law Society, the Journal of Islamic Law and Culture, the Environmental Law Society, and the H.L.A. Hart Society. His service includes enlistment and commission in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve and membership in the Iraq Advisory Group of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, in 2005.
Introduction to the Oxford Edition: The Bramble Bush and You by Steve Sheppard
Foreword (1950 Edition)
Preface (1930 Edition)
Acknowledgments (1950 Edition)
Acknowledgments (1930 (Edition)
Part One: The Bramble Bush
Chapter I
What Law Is About
Chapter II
This Case System: What Lies Behind the Case
Chapter III
This Case System: What to Do with the Cases
Chapter IV
This Case System: Precedent
Chapter V
Ships and Shoes and Sealing Wax
Chapter VI
And Law School Offers What?
Part Two: The Other Side
Chapter VII
Law and Civilization
Chapter VIII
Beyond Bread and Butter
Chapter IX
The Second Year
Chapter X
Before Sunrise
They That Come After
Afterword
Index
Karl N. Llewellyn was a revered law professor who taught for most of his career at Columbia Law School and the University of Chicago. Renowned as a scholar in many fields, he was a principal author of the Uniform Commercial Code, the nationwide system of commercial law still followed throughout the United States.
Steve Sheppard is the William H. Enfield Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas. Among his writings, he is the coauthor, with George Fletcher, of American Law in a Global Context: The Basics, also published by Oxford University Press.
"If you have any doubt about your level of skill, interest, or readiness to study the law, purchase and read a copy of The Bramble Bush-The Classic Lectures on the Law and Law School, now updated and published anew in 2008 by Oxford University Press. Law school is a bramble bush. You need to prepare yourself for the reality of its experience. [Llewellyn's] The Bramble Bush offers rich and nuanced answers to questions about what the law is, the case system, the nature of law school, and your legal studies beyond the first year. You will greatly benefit if you let Professor Llewellyn (with Professor Sheppard's essential assistance) take you by the hand for this journey."
--Brad Dobeck, President, PrelawAdvisor.com
"Karl Llewellyn was one of the greatest legal minds of the twentieth century, and The Bramble Bush is one of his classics-illuminating and even indispensable reading for each generation of law students and lawyers, and wonderful for general readers as well." -- Cass R. Sunstein, Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor, The University of Chicago Law School
"...one of the greatest works ever written on the nature of law and legal education. In a sometimes sharp, sometime whimsical, always brilliant analysis, Llewellyn offers invaluable insights to anyone contemplating the study of law." -- Geoffrey Stone,Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor, The University of Chicago Law School
"The Bramble Bush reads to me today as it read to me three decades ago as a law student: fresh, brassy, irreverent, impudent, and brilliant. To suggest that the study of law should focus on how and why judges and officials and lawyers in the real world actually behave in our legal system! To suggest that law is not simply an arid matrix of rules and theories and principles! The nerve! In this time in the history of legal education in which law schools are reinventing themselves, we would all do well to read The Bramble Bush again and again." --Rodney A. Smolla, Dean and Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law
