Product Description

Legal Skills encompasses all the academic and practical legal skills vital to a law degree in one manageable volume. It is an ideal text for the first-year law student and is also a valuable resource for those studying law at any level. Clearly structured in three parts, the book covers the full range of legal skills and contains many features designed to support a truly practical approach. Self-test questions, diagrams and definition boxes are set in a user-friendly colour design. Practical exercises give the reader useful 'hands on' experience of tackling a variety of legal skills: from using cases to mooting. Each skill is firmly set in its wider academic and professional context to encourage an integrated appreciation of legal skills. Online Resource Centre The book is accompanied by an innovative Online Resource Centre offering a range of resources to support teaching and learning. Videos of good and bad 'real life' moots in action bring the subject to life for students. Lecturers can track student progress using an online bank of 200 multiple choice questions offering immediate answers and feedback that can be customised and loaded on to the university's VLE.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75114 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 424 pages

About the Author
Dr Emily Finch is a law lecturer at Brunel University with extensive experience in the teaching of legal skills. She won an award for Teaching Excellence at the University of Reading in 2003 and was also nominated in the 'Rising Star' category of the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme of the Higher Education Academy. In 2003 she led a team to victory in the National Client Interviewing Competition of England and Wales who went on to represent England and Wales in the international
final. She is an accomplished author and has published extensively in the areas of stalking, drug-assisted rape and identity fraud.

Customer Reviews

Everything that you ever wanted to know about studying law but never got told
I love this book. I can't believe that I didn't have it before because it would have saved me so much grief. It has everything in it that my lecturers kept telling me that I ought to be doing but never seemed to think it was there job to tell me how I should be doing it. It is like referencing. I kept getting work back that said my referencing wasn't good enough but never once did anyone tell me how to make it better. It is the same with problem questions. Telling me that I didn't have the technique was never going to help me get it. But now this book tells me all the things that I need to know and I can see how much it is going to help me. It is like the sections on finding cases and articles. I've never been able to find things and I'd given up and thought 'if it's not in my textbook, I'm not going to read it' but the really simple instructions on searching gave me courage to try and now it is all so easy that I don't know what I thought it was a problem. If I'd had this book to do my first year legal systems course then I wouldn't have struggled nearly as much as I did. All you need as a student is someone to tell you how to do things but lecturers don't do that - they just expect you to be able to do it by magic and then have a go at you for getting it wrong. This book tells me how to do all sorts of things and now I am a much better student as a result. My only complaint is that I've had to get through two years of my degree without anybody telling me these things before. I mean, why not? This books makes it all so easy so surely someone at my university could have spelt things out for us a bit more. This should be compulsory reading for every law student everywhere.

I love this book
If you are studying law, you need this book. It is like an encylodpedia of all the things that you need to knwo to do well on your degree.

I'm just starting my second year and I didn't have this book last year and I didn't do that well. I tried but I found it hard to work out what some of the advice meant on doing essays and particularly problems. My exam results weren't the greatest and I did think about giving it up and doing something else. My dad said 'perhaps you're not just cut out for law' but my gran said that was nonsense and bought me this book. I don't know why she chose this one but i'm glad she did becuase it has made every single thing that I didn't understand totally and utterly clear as a bell. I've used the suggestions on problem questions to go back over my coursework from last year where i was getting marks like 48 and 50 and now I can see that it was so bad and I did so much wrong but I just didn't realise. I emailed my tutor for one of the subjects and told him that I'd been worried about my marks so I'd done some work over the summer and rewritten an essay and would he look at it and tell me if it was better and he said that it was a 'terrific improvement' and that it was now worth at least 15% more marks. I was made up because that would make it my best mark ever. So now all I have to do is follow the instructions in the book and I'll be getting marks up in the 60's for my coursework and be understnading what I have to do.

The reason I think this book is essential is that it is so clear that it gets rid of any doubt about what you have do so. There are step to step guides on essays, findings cases, writing and exams and all the other things that we need to know but nobody tells us.

The only legal skills book you'll need
I used the Law Express revision books by these authors before the exams last year and did better than I expected. Then I spotted this new one they've written - there is tons of useful stuff in here, not just on how to find the law (the guides to databases here are brilliant) and how to read it but most importantly how to use it in answering questions and how to write in a proper legal style. I've struggled with my writing and technique so far, but I can see where I've been going wrong - why my lecturers never told me any of this, I'll never know! I'm going to carry on reading it over the summer and I'm sure I'll do better next year. I'm not sure why they haven't made it look more like the others in their revision series, but if that's the only complaint I have, it must tell you how good the book is! Thank you!