About the Book
Legal Method and Writing
Sixth Edition
Charles R. Calleros, Arizona State University
2011. 620 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7355-8512-6.
About the Book
This comprehensive coursebook for legal writing focuses on the needs of first-year law students.
Features:
- Comprehensive and practical approach to teaching writing and analysis skills.
- Throughout, the book anchors basic skills to examples familiar to students and provides real-life examples tied to interesting cases. Many examples are drawn from contracts and torts to make the material accessible to first-year students.
- Covers different types of legal writing, including writing in law school, writing in the law office, advocacy writing, appellate briefs, pretrial advocacy, and writing to parties. Goes beyond the memo and the brief to include pleadings, motions, contracts, and letters as well as case briefs, course outlines, and essay examination answers.
- Highly regarded through five editions for its effectiveness in teaching students to apply legal reasoning skills to professional writing tasks.
- Author strives to include multicultural issues in his problems and examples.
- Practical exercises give students an opportunity to sharpen skills.
- Comprehensive Teacher’s Manual gives advice on how to use the book in a variety of course configurations.
New to the Sixth Edition:
- Existing material has been refined and improved
- A new exercise that includes excerpts of the debate between Supreme Court justices on the application of stare decisis to the 2010 campaign finance case, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.
- Discussion of the streamlined email memo is added to chapter 11, along with samples.
- Expanded discussion and illustration of legal uncertainty and the student's task of developing arguments in the face of that uncertainty and the need to constantly imagine change and improvement in the law.
- Updated discussion of pleading standards in light of the Supreme Court's decisions in Twombly and Iqbal.
- Citation coverage will be updated to cover the new editions of the Bluebook and ALWD.
