The Bramble Bush: The Classic Lectures on the Law and Law School » (1st Edition)

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.

For over seventy years, there has been one book that law students have read to prepare for what they were about to encounter. That book is The Bramble Bush. After all these years and many imitators, The Bramble Bush remains one of the most popular introductions to the law and its study.

Llewellyn introduces students to what the law is, how to read cases, how to prepare for class, and how justice in the real world relates to the law. Although laws change every year, disputes between people haven't altered all that much since Llewellyn first penned The Bramble Bush, and the process of moving from private dispute to legal conflict still follows the patterns he described.

Moreover, the steps of a legal dispute, from arguments to verdict, to opinion, to review, to appeal, to opinion have changed little in their significance or their substance. Cases are still the best tools for exploring the interaction of the law with individual questions, and the essence of what law students must learn to do has persisted. If anything, many of the points Llewellyn argued in these lectures were on the dawning horizon then but are in their mid-day fullness now.

Introduction to the Oxford Edition: The Bramble Bush and You   Steve Sheppard     ix
Foreword (1951 Edition)     xxiii
Preface (1930 Edition)     xxv
Acknowledgments (1951 Edition)     xxvii
Acknowledgments (1930 Edition)     xxxiii
The Bramble Bush
What Law Is About     3
This Case System: What Lies Behind the Case     19
This Case System: What to Do with the Cases     37
This Case System: Precedent     55
Ships and Shoes and Sealing Wax     73
And Law School Offers What?     97
The Other One
Law and Civilization     115
Beyond Bread and Butter     129
The Second Year     143
Before Sunrise     155
They That Come After     167
Afterword     169
Index     179