Gilbert Law Summaries: Constitutional Law

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The Gilbert Law Summaries series provides some of the best study guides out there for harried law students. The great advantage of the Gilbert approach is the logical layout of concepts in an outline format, helping you digest vast areas of laws in manageable chunks. When it comes to Constitutional Law, the subject is just so enormous by nature that it makes this particular book longer and denser, somewhat betraying the Gilbert goal of a summarized study guide. For that reason, this book would be better utilized for periodic reviews throughout your course, rather than as a cramming aide right before the exam. Those difficulties are due to the subject matter, not the publisher, but there are some other internal faults that hold this guide back from true greatness. First are the annoying and snooty section numbers, particularly as used in the index, as regular old page numbers would be much easier to manage. The flowcharts and textboxes are mostly useless because they are just too simplified, and merely reproduce text that you already read by putting boxes around it (for the best flowcharts for the thinking law student, see the Aspen CrunchTime series). This book is also loaded with typos, such as "must generally past muster" on page 302 or "The government action is consti-" in a predictably under-achieving flowchart on page 280. Like all of the Gilbert Law Summaries, this one does a fine job of supplementing your learning, but for the above reasons it's not quite totally dependable as a study aide during stress week. [~doomsdayer520~]

Although this is designed for students, this book is a nice introduction for citizens who just want a better idea of what our Constitution is all about. The outline format is easy to follow and gives lots of references to cases to read.

I have used various law school outlines, and I definitely find the Gilberts format to be the best. Not only are they easy to follow, but the content seems to be pertinent for any casebook.