How lawyers actually think — a transferable skill.
9 topics · 8 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study
Karl N. Llewellyn · 1930
Introduces the case method to new law students, arguing that legal rules only mean anything in light of what courts actually do with them, not their…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Algorithm as a Human Artifact: Implications for Legal [Re]Search
Susan Nevelow Mart · 2017
Running the same query on different US legal research databases returns meaningfully different top results, showing that algorithmic legal search is…
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law
James Bradley Thayer · 1898
Sets out the common law's rules for burdens of proof and presumptions, arguing a 'presumption' is properly just a rule about who must produce…
+2 more at this level
8 works
Karl N. Llewellyn
Introduces the case method to new law students, arguing that legal rules only mean anything in light of what courts actually do with them, not their bare verbal formulation.
John W. Davis
Effective appellate advocacy before an American court rests on selecting the one or two points that can actually decide the case, not on arguing every point available.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard C. Wydick
Argues legal writing should replace long sentences, passive voice and archaic terms of art with the plain, direct style of good non-legal prose, without losing precision.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Orin S. Kerr
A US judicial opinion is a compressed argument whose procedural posture, facts, holding and reasoning must be reconstructed piece by piece before a reader can know what it actually decided.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Susan Nevelow Mart
Running the same query on different US legal research databases returns meaningfully different top results, showing that algorithmic legal search is not a neutral window onto 'the law'.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James Bradley Thayer
Sets out the common law's rules for burdens of proof and presumptions, arguing a 'presumption' is properly just a rule about who must produce evidence next, not evidence in itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Karl N. Llewellyn
Catalogues dozens of canons of statutory construction and shows most come paired with an equal and opposite counter-canon, arguing courts must be selecting a result on other grounds and using canons to justify it afterwards.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Cass R. Sunstein
Reasoning by analogy in American case law works by extracting low-level principles that unify already-decided cases, letting courts agree on outcomes without resolving deeper theoretical disputes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026