An Introduction to Legal Reasoning

You'll love this book - it makes you feel like you are back in law school again!

I appreciate Edward Levi's attention to detail. This book definitely goes beyond the standard textbook in terms of putting together a guide that is both interesting to read and informative. I'd recommend it to anybody in my situation, planning to attend law school, or even to practicing attorneys in need of a handy, compact reference guide to the basics.

The power to determine the law of the land resides within every citizen of the country by means of electing the officials they choose and the judicial system only upholds the law. The citizens of a country elect their leaders and once elected they are enshrined with the right to uphold the economic and political stability but any improper actions of a government should be corrected by means of the judicial process rather than by any political process. All differing opinions should be allowed to coexist with checks and balances as determined by the judicial system.

Legal reasoning is famously ambiguous: there's no objective way to determine the outcome of a given case as there is with a physics problem. If you know the weight of an item and the height from which it drops, you are able to determine fairly objectively (i) the rate at which it will fall to the earth and (ii) the time it will take to fall to the earth from the point at which it is dropped. Law, unfortunately, is not so straight-forward. Understanding its assumptions is absolutely critical to developing any sort of sophisticated understanding about the ways in which law affects civilization. This book provides a broad outline of those assumptions. I suggest having at least a rudimentary background in intellectual history and political philosophy to get the most out of this book.

In this book Levi gives an overview of the process of legal analysis and demonstrates how legal "rules" are made. The book consists of primarily 3 parts. In the first part Levi demonstrates the process of legal reasoning in case law situations by tracing the history and development of the "inherently dangerous" rule. The second part is an examination of statutory interpretation, specifically the Mann Act. Finally, is a section on constitutional interpretation. This book is not for pre-law students it will offer the most once the reader has already been introduced to the basics of the law and legal reasoning.