Written generations ago, but highly relevant today, The Bramble Bush remains one of the books most recommended for students to read when considering law school, just before beginning its study, or early in the first semester. [NOTE: Only the Quid Pro versions offer the modern features noted below (even if this description appears under other presses' used or new books, or customer reviews that decry the poor quality of reprints).] It began as a collection of introductory lectures by legal legend Karl Llewellyn to new law students at Columbia. It still speaks to law, legal reasoning, and exam-taking skills in a way that makes it a classic for each new generation.
The Quid Pro edition includes an extensive, modern Introduction by Stewart Macaulay, renowned law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Macaulay updates the current reader on the book's continued relevance and application, offers a practical perspective to new law students, and places the original edition in its historical context. Simply put, Macaulay writes, this "is a book that anyone interested in law schools or law should read."
The Quid Pro edition of the classic work also includes several unobtrusive annotations, to update the reader on legal terms and cultural references made in the original that may not be clear to today's reader. Moreover, this is a carefully proofread and clearly presented edition, lacking the errors and scanning mistakes of other presses' editions even from famous publishers (e.g., it's "canons" of jurisprudence, not "cannons"!). It is also available in eBook and clothbound formats from Quid Pro, including the annotations and modern introduction by Prof. Macaulay.
Llewellyn's pointed and clear explanations of case briefing before class, visualization of case facts, active learning in class, the use of precedent, exam formats, and the limits of logic have proved timeless and highly practical. They remain excellent advice for current students to consider and implement in their own journey into the law. This is no Chamber of Commerce speech of mere platitudes about law practice and the grandeur of the bar. To be sure, Llewellyn believed in law school and legal education, and in dreaming big about a life in the law. But he was-famously-a realist above all, and this book gets to the nuts and bolts of studying law successfully in traditional legal education.
Whether from the enduring nature of his hands-on advice, or from the reality that the first year of law study and its classroom method simply have not changed very much over the years, the book remains, by all accounts, targeted to the way 'thinking like a lawyer' continues in the modern law school.
Now in a high-quality new edition from Quid Pro, The Bramble Bush is part of the Legal Legends Series. It features embedded page numbers from the previous, standard print editions-for continuity of assignments and referencing. Our production uses hyperaccurate checking against the original source-avoiding the misquotes, distracting formatting errors, and partial sentences common in other reprints.
Also in the Series, look for explained and introduced new editions of such classic works as Holmes' The Common Law (called The Annotated Common Law, with some 200 simple notes to decode Holmes and the law he famously describes); Cardozo's The Nature of the Judicial Process (with extensive introduction by his premier biographer, Harvard Law's Andrew Kaufman); and Holmes' The Path of the Law and Warren & Brandeis' The Right to Privacy (both introduced by Steven Alan Childress of Tulane Law School).
