July 2019
Dear First-Year Students,
The goal of the Academic Skills Program is to help you figure out how to tackle your legal education. You’ll hear from us at orientation, and during your first year, we’ll offer a variety of opportunities to build and hone your law-school skills. But you might be wondering whether there’s anything you can do right now to begin to get ready for your first year. Elsewhere on this page you may have seen a great (and long) list of books about law school, the legal profession, and legal theory. Allow us to offer up a few more texts that might be more immediately helpful as you’re transitioning to a new style of learning. Law school is (mostly) taught through in-class dialogue about legal opinions (we call it the “case method”). To prepare you for those dialogues, we recommend both a book called Cracking the Case Method: Legal Analysis for Law School Success (by Paul Bergman, Patrick Goodman, and Thomas Holm) and the attached article, “How to Read a Legal Opinion” (by Orin Kerr). Another book that might be helpful is What Every Law Student Really Needs to Know: An Introduction to the Study of Law (by Tracey George and Suzanna Sherry). It covers some of the same ground as the other two texts, but it is also broader—providing background information on the American legal system and introducing common legal concepts.
Please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions. I really look forward to meeting you in the fall. And in the meantime, have a fantastic summer!
Diana DiGennaro
Director, Academic Skills Program
ddigennaro@law.berkeley.edu