Best torts law books according to redditors
We found 18 Reddit comments discussing the best torts law books. We ranked the 14 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 18 Reddit comments discussing the best torts law books. We ranked the 14 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We must have been reading This Book.
(Real book by the way)
https://www.amazon.com/Torts-Nutshell-Edward-Kionka-ebook/dp/B012H3ARQE/
As a 1L you should NOT be using bar prep books. They will not be helpful. I was talking to two other law reviewers this morning and we all agreed that our #1 favorite study aid (by a very large margin) was the Q&A series from LexisNexis. They are books of 150-250 multiple choice questions on almost all law school subjects. They are broken down by topic, so you can easily skip the ones that you didn't cover in class.
Many people don't use these books for essay tests because they don't think that multiple choice practice helps for essay. This is a huge mistake. Example: Con Law. We had the quintessential "hide the ball" obfuscating professor who gave an open book essay exam (3 questions). The Q&A had very succinct explanations of complicated ideas like "rational basis with bite," and doing the problems and reading the explanations gave us a good understanding of the basic rules as well as an easy way to explain them. Breaking ideas down into applicable rules and then applying them is the hardest part of 1L, and the book basically does it for you, while helping you to memorize it all at the same time. Come test time, between the three of us, we had three A's and a CALI in Con Law, and we all were top 10%.
The only time Q&A is bad is when the prof does mostly state law. Other than that, I have used them in almost every 1L and "bar" class to great success. They are typically $10-15 used on Amazon.
Link to Torts Version
Has anyone used Glannon's E&E for Torts? I liked the Civil Procedure book and am considering getting the version for Torts.
http://www.amazon.com/Examples-Explanations-The-Law-Torts/dp/1454850116/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
Kenneth Abraham's.
http://www.amazon.com/Forms-Functions-Tort-Concepts-Insights/dp/160930053X
Check this out OP over 1000 pages hardcover 10$
Prosser and Keeton on Torts, 5th Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/0314748806/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_eW6YCbN4TRW1G
Any particular field you're interested in? My favorite is criminal law/procedure, but that's because I enjoy/hate observing the disconnect between the justices and reality on the ground.
Oh, wow, I just realized you said 1L resources. Siegel's are absolutely amazing. They're just practice questions and essays, but if you're looking to do well in exams, you have to take several practice ones beforehand anyways.
I totally concur with OP, supplements are supplements, not replacements. Read the case book, then read the relevant chapter from the supplement to ensure you got everything you were supposed to get out of it. Once you are getting everything out of the casebook in the first pass, you can discard supplements entirely if you like.
Best supplements, in my opinion:
You can quibble on some, but any law student worth his salt will recognize Dressler on crim and Chemerinsky on con law as the best. Freer on Civ Pro is very well recognized as well. I like the Understanding series for contracts and property because they are still succinct yet more in-depth than the E&E's. I like the E&E for torts because the Understanding book for that class isn't especially good.
If you don't like any of the above, the respective E&E would be my second choice.
The Examples and Explanations series. [Examples and Explanations] (https://www.amazon.com/Law-Torts-Examples-Explanations-4th/dp/0735588740/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536629513&sr=1-2&keywords=examples+and+explanations+torts)
There's a book on almost every law school subject.
Step 1: Get off reddit.
Step 2: Buy this with overnight shipping
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Do reasonably well on the exam
http://www.amazon.com/Blocking-Courthouse-Door-Republican-Corporate/dp/0743277007
Read it.
My casebooks this semester on Amazon below. Note that rental prices are probably lower than they usually are this late into the semester.
Generally, casebooks are ~$200+ new. I probably spend $50 per casebook to rent them.
Legislation and Regulation, Cases and Materials (University Casebook Series) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1634606477/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_VKKVCbYFK1H1B
Tort Law and Alternatives: Cases and Materials (University Casebook Series) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1634593006/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_gLKVCbRQ8X98Q
Property: Principles and Policies (University Casebook Series) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1628101024/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_HLKVCbQGDX5A0
The "Understanding Products Liability Law" book from LexisNexis was really helpful for me.
http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Products-Liability-Bruce-Ottley/dp/0769863752
If you've ever seen anything like the Gilbert Law Summaries or the Black Letter Outlines, those are "commercial outlines." Essentially, they provide a fairly comprehensive account of entire areas of the law. Personally, I would not exclusively rely on one to study. Your library should have some on the hold shelf, and you should skim through one if you are curious. Still, though, I would opt to use a past outline from a student who took the course in question and start there.
On sale if that helps: https://www.amazon.com/Prosser-Wade-Schwartzs-Torts-Materials/dp/1599417049
My god I wish I had found a succinct yet not dumbed-down summary of this sort of stuff when I was dealing with a personal injury case. I can't help but feel that the legal profession (not lawyers themselves) functions largely on information-hiding. Perhaps I should make a summary... I don't know if this is a good topic for wikibooks.
A summary of how CFA fee structures work
Okay so I want to make sure you have a good understanding of how the fee structure works:
CFA's operate as a cap on legal costs so that the law firm can only take costs and success fee up to say 25% of your award (this is the legal maximum).
Separate to this, if you win they will charge you:
If you obtain no money they will charge you nothing.
Amount paid on winning = minimum(Costs - Reclaimable percentage Costs - Success fee Costs, cap * Awa
The figures you were quoted were pretty standard. I got quoted a 15% cap by some people. I have read on the internet about people getting a 50% success fee before going to trial.
Alternative fee structures
My understanding is that CFAs are the industry standard for how cases are funded. I kind of suggested not wanting to take a CFA and wasn't magically greeted with alternatives.
Likely payout
I imagine 10000 GBP is on the high side unless you have missed a bunch of work and not been paid for it or have a pretty nasty injury (i.e. joint injuries), or the prospect of future medical costs (e.g. arthritis). The legal system would seem to value your reputation a lot more highly than your limbs.
You should go and read this book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Guidelines-Assessment-General-Damages-Personal/dp/019875762X/ref=dp_ob_title_bk to find out what your likely payment is. This is what lawyers and judges and everyone uses to value damages. It is pretty much equivalent to case law. Your lawyer will just read this book find the appropriate section and tell you it. The judge in a case will read this book find the appropriate section and have a guess of where your injury falls in this section.
Rant about personal injury damages guidance
Having a bit of a moan: The fact that this book is not in the public domain is a real disgrace and the judicial college and the author of the book should feel and enduring sense of shame for how much uncertainty and wasted time they impose upon individuals by choosing to sell this book for a profit. Further, the lack of clarity and referencing in this book that has become a defacto standard for decision making again is a source of needless uncertainty and suffering.
In their defence, this book was written before the advent of the internet and BAILII, so at the time of writing selling the book may have been an efficient means of transmitting this information. However, if the law commission is able to publish reports from the 1960s on the internet the judicial college should be able to publish this canonical document.
It is slightly galling, to find you can't assess the value of an injury and because the author was unwilling to take the 10 minutes to list the cases that he spent hours reading "for the sake of brevity". As a reference work, brevity is not really the readers concern.
The cynic in me thinks that the reason of not quoting cases might be because
Nature of legal costs
The issue in personal damage cases tends not to be about liability or non-liability rather how much the other party is willing to pay you and this is the reason that you end up going to court. (Although the possibility of the other part not being liable with push down the amount they offer you).
The government introduced a system call one way qualified cost shifting: http://www.hardwicke.co.uk/insights/archive/articles/an-introduction-to-qualified-one-way-costs-shifting-new-cpr-4413-17 to encourage parties to settle out of court. Lawyers didn't seem that good at explaining this to me in conversations and I have a enduring interest in game theory, economics and evolutionary biology. So I would suggest getting an understanding of this from reading before talking to a lawyer.
Economic discussion of incentives
Regarding costs there are a couple of other things you should consider. I imagine lawyers are a pretty respectable profession; their costs will be accurate and they will work diligently on what they are doing regardless of funding meethod. On the other hand, there is a benefit of them having some skin in the game: this is an advantage of CFAs. This would probably show up when lawyers professionally and competently do something that you tell them to do which is a bad idea, or competently finish something that is not valuable for you. As such, if I was doing anything complicated I would want to incentivise lawyers with a share of the proceeds.
On the other hand, before a case goes to court when you are just going through the correct legal motions, I feel these incentives are less important. This is mostly just me thinking out loud: a real lawyers experience would be useful here.
If I was feeling forceful and energetic I might consider self funding until you have an offer from your counteryparty, but then taking on a CFA if you choose to go court. However I had no experience with this.
In my case getting to the point of a having an offer cost about 3000 pounds though there were some complicating issues here.
I imagine you could also tell your lawyer "don't spend more than this" and after this stage obtain a CFA. I don't know how happy lawyers are with this sort of stuff. I imagine they find collecting payment boring and lawyering interesting: a CFA gets rid a bunch of boring admin for them. "We win, we give you some money, done".
There is also the complex question of loss aversion on the party of their customers, and them not wanting to be responsible for their clients actively losing money from a case.
Where you get your lawyers
It is perfectly possible to carry out this sort of case without ever speaking to your lawyer, so you can find lawyers from anywhere in the country and compare their fees.
The exception to this might be if the injuries are very traumatic (or you are finding them traumatic) in which case seeing a lawyer in person can be advantageous from the point of view of not having another relationship to manage.
(Edit: fix up lots of grammar mistakes... reddit is not the best medium for essay!)
Here though it won't come in time for the test tomorrow.
The first year is rough, but rewarding if you stick to it. My tip to you: buy this book!
Easily the most valuable resource you can have in a torts class, and great to keep for down the line (I still have mine, and refer to it often). Crystal clear explanations, it oftentimes will boil down readings you have to do in class to a few paragraphs, and is extremely well-respected source. Probably the best 60 bucks you can spend in your first year of law school.