Law Books
Pictures of lawyers and lawyer commercials often feature a bookcase filled with leather bound tomes of law. What’s in them? A list of laws? Socratic discourses about what’s legal and what’s not? Pictures? Do lawyers read these books?
The answer has changed over time. When I went to law school, law books were vital resources to research cases to understand how judges applied law in similar circumstances to the ones at issue in a case. Now they often serve as starting points for research or as broad explainers to areas of law the reader may be unfamiliar with.
Why should you read this post about law books?
You want to buy an expensive and useless gift for someone.
You’re a set designer on a movie about lawyers and you want to know if the law books will be a good touch or a bad one.
You like the counterintuitive idea of reading a web page to learn about a book.
Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_book#/media/File:Hampshire_County_Law_Books.jpg
Hornbooks Help Lawyers Become Familiar With a New Area of Law
The most useful books to me are those that help lawyers become familiar with a new area of law. These books are often called “hornbooks” and they provide a basic overview in plain English of the laws in a particular field.
Some hornbooks are basically law school textbooks. They are written to explain the law to a student and they cite the major cases concerning different subjects within that field. It is a major honor within legal academia to be an author of one of these textbooks, and it is common for lawyers to cite these textbooks in their legal briefs as proof that the law that they are citing is firmly established. Major examples include Farnsworth on Contracts and this book on Civil Procedure by, among others, Arthur Miller.
These kind of hornbooks usually come in one volume, or a small number of volumes.
But the most helpful kind of hornbooks are legal encyclopedias, which usually come in dozens of volumes. These are the American Jurisprudence books and their variants and competitors, like New York Jurisprudence and Carmody and Wait. These books explain a large number of subjects in great detail and cite major cases that illustrate those legal principles. Because they go into greater depth, they are more useful for answering specific questions that may arise in an assignment.
Reporter Volumes Publish Actual Court Decisions
When a court issues a decision, often that decision is published in a book called a reporter. These books do not explain the law in plain English, but instead just re-print decisions so that lawyers can research the exact holdings for citation in their memoranda. As a result, these books may be harder to understand and use, but allow the reader to directly interpret the law instead of relying on an author to interpret it for her.
Legal citations still refer to these reporters, even though a lot of legal research is done online. For example, the citation to Conboy v. U.S. Small Business Admin. is 992 F.3d 153. This literally means that the case is published on page 153 of the 992nd volume of the third edition of the Federal Reporter.
Since books are not text searchable like websites are, finding cases in books can be difficult without already knowing the citation. This is why many books have indexes that list cases that concern various subjects. And this is also why computer-based legal research is much more popular than using books.
Books Are Often Out of Date
The law changes constantly, so books are not always reliable sources for legal information. While books can provide a good start for legal research, most lawyers confirm their research by checking online to make sure the books are still accurate.
Many law books cite very old cases that were current or frequently cited when the book was first published. The publishers attempt to keep the books current by issuing “pocket parts,” that are additional pages that can be folded into the end of the book that contain updates since the book was published. But pocket parts can also fall out of date since they only come out every few months.
Today, many books are automatically updated online. I frequently look up items in the legal encyclopedia sections on Lexis or Westlaw instead of using the actual books. Many firms encourage this because books are expensive to update and, even then, may still require online research to confirm their accuracy.