Who is your lawyer, and what does he or she really do? That's a question that's not easy to answer--unless you go the source. And unfortunately, most lawyers won't give you a straight answer.

In What Your Lawyer May Not Want You to Know, Billy F. Brown unveils the mystery of how lawyers work and how they communicate. In simple language, he helps you understand what happens in a law practice, and he explains the problems clients encounter with lawyers and vice versa. You'll learn

- how to determine whether you need a lawyer; - what questions to ask a lawyer; - why lawyers generally disagree with each other; and - how to gain considerable advantages by understanding the legal process.

Whether you're a client, a lawyer, or someone in law school, this guidebook will provide you with important insights about the nature of the legal process. Get a rare insider's look into the practice of law with What Your Lawyer May Not Want You to Know.

If you thought corruption was limited to Capitol Hill, think again. The men and women that wear the black robes and dispense justice play the game hard and well. The place reeks with inside deals and scams. Look out Whitewater. Here comes the Wizard of Court House Corruption

The Inspiration for Professor Kingsfield Discusses His Career, Teaching Methods Professional Issues and Other Subjects. Originally published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942. xi, 164 pp. Spartan Education offers a fascinating account of Harvard Law School from the turn of the century to the 1940s, colorful sketches of his professors, Mr. Cadwallader and a summary of his "Spartan" approach to pedagogy. Warren also includes the texts of various addresses and articles dealing with Harvard, legal history, the American Bar and political topics.
This is a reprint of the 1942 edition, which was strictly limited to 1000 copies. (Despite requests for additional copies, Warren refused to reissue the book. (He published an edition of extracts instead, however, in order to address these requests while keep his word.)
"I believe in discipline. From boyhood days on, I have sought to discipline my own mind, pen, and tongue. And throughout my service on the Law Faculty I have sought to discipline the minds, pens, and tongues of the students. I have never suffered fools gladly, and regard such sufferance as mischievous. Therefore 'Spartan Education' seemed an appropriate title. As I review my life, I find the source of greatest satisfaction in my belief that there are today ten thousand men who are leading more useful and successful lives than they would be leading if my Spartan training had not played a substantial part in the molding of their minds; and that most, if not all, of them now recognize that to be the fact, and are grateful." -- Preface, ix
Edward H. Warren 1873-1945] was a legendary professor at Harvard Law School. Known as "Bull" Warren for his aggressive (and often vicious) teaching methods, he was the primary model for Professor Kingsfield in John Jay Osborn, Jr.'s novel The Paper Chase. Warren attended Harvard College from 1891 to 1895 and Harvard Law School from 1897 to 1900, where his principal instructors were Ames, Gray, Smith and Thayer. After four years at Strong and Cadwalader, he joined the Harvard Law faculty, where he remained until his retirement.

Harkjoon Paik left his native Korea in the midst of war. His home destroyed and his educational opportunities lost, he left everything and everyone behind in search of a way to accomplish his life goals. He arrived in the United States as an ambitious and optimistic teenager, knowing no one and without resources.

"Tracking the Tiger" is the story of how he survived in the chaos of battle and immigration. He created a new life for himself, making his way with hard work, and went on to earn degrees from Stanford University and Stanford Law School. He began to practice law and, at the age of thirty-eight, became the first native-born Korean to sit on the Superior Court bench in not only California but also the United States.

Judge Paik finds joy in life wherever he goes. He has raised three children of great accomplishment, and he shares many lifelong friendships and some great adventures along the way.

His wife, Beverly Paik, tells the story of her husband's life and career in his voice. They met more than fifty years ago as students at Stanford University. When he granted her access to his diaries, she knew his was a story that needed to be shared with a much bigger audience.

This is their story, one of love and triumph over adversity--and of the undeniable power of hope.

This book examines why laws fail and provides strategies for making laws that work. Why do some laws fail? And how can we make laws that actually work? This helpful guide, written by a leading jurist, provides answers to these questions and gives practical strategies for law-making. It looks at a range of laws which have failed; the 'damp squibs' that achieve little or nothing in practice; laws that overshoot their policy goals; laws that produce nasty surprises; and laws that backfire, undermining the very goals they were intended to advance. It goes on to examine some of the reasons why such failures occur, drawing on insights from psychology and economics, including the work of Kahneman and others on how humans develop narratives about the ways in which the world works and make predictions about the future. It provides strategies to reduce the risk of failure of legislative projects, including adopting a more structured and systematic approach to analysing the likely effects of the legislation; ensuring we identify the limits of our knowledge and the uncertainties of our predictions; and framing laws in a way that enables us to adjust the way they operate as new information becomes available or circumstances change. Key themes include the importance of the institutions that administer the legislation, of default outcomes, and of the 'stickiness' of those defaults. The book concludes with helpful checklists of questions to ask and issues to consider, which will be of benefit to anyone involved in designing legislation.

The Legal Profession in South Africa: History, Liability & Regulation discusses the history of the legal profession in South Africa, the common-law liability of legal practitioners and the regulation of the profession. The work describes the development of the profession in South Africa, highlighting the complex role that practitioners have played in the development of our society. It also explores the legal nature of the relationships that may exist between practitioners and clients as well as between practitioners themselves.

The fundamental questions at the core of the book are: what are the duties that are imposed upon legal practitioners by contract law or otherwise, and under what circumstances can they be held liable towards clients and third parties? The most important provisions of the Legal Practice Act, as well as the Rules and Regulations issued under the Act, are set out and explained. The broader issues of legal ethics and professional conduct are considered along with the ethical and statutory duties of legal practitioners towards clients, the courts and their colleagues.

The final chapter covers personal costs orders, setting out the categories and instances in which courts have made these orders in the past. This book is aimed at anyone interested in the legal profession. It is an essential addition to the library of legal practitioners who will benefit from the discussion of various theoretical and practical issues related to the work they do. It is also a useful tool for law students who seek a better understanding of the legal profession.

A PIONEER IN AMERICAN LEGAL EDUCATION In 1817 David Hoffman published A Course of Legal Study, an ambitious, systematically organized program of readings for aspiring attorneys. It was widely acclaimed upon publication; Joseph Story said it offered "by far the most perfect system for the study of the law which has ever been offered to the public." Hoffman published this book while helping to establish the Law Institute of the newly founded University of Maryland. He expounded the principles of the Course in his lectures. A few were published as pamphlets to promote Hoffman's ideas and attract students. In 1837 he re-published them, along with a few related texts, in a book entitled Introductory Lectures, And Syllabus of a Course of Lectures, Delivered in the University of Maryland. The Law Library of the Library of Congress holds the only known copy. Life, Letters and Lectures returns this rare volume to print and adds an illuminating biographical sketch of Hoffman and a consideration of his library that reprints an auction catalogue of his books prepared for his estate by Henry Wheaton. DAVID HOFFMAN 1784-1854] was a prominent pioneer in the establishment of university-based legal education. He helped to found the University of Maryland Law School in 1816 and was its first professor. His A Course of Legal Study (1817) and Legal Outlines (1829) played a critical role in the development of law school curricula and provided guidance to hundreds of antebellum law students and attorneys. BILL SLEEMAN is the Assistant Director for Technical Services, Thurgood Marshall Law Library, The University of Maryland School of Law.

Clarence Darrow is best remembered as the defense attorney in some of the most famous (and infamous) cases in American legal history. With his brilliant closing argument that saved the thrill killers Leopold and Loeb from the gallows and his impassioned defense of John T. Scopes's right to teach evolution in the classroom, Darrow became a legend even in his own time. But such a towering reputation often obscures the man behind it, and attempts to shoehorn him into a single political party due to his long association with the labor movement have only further muddled his legacy. As the historian Andrew E. Kersten shows in this insightful biography of America's most celebrated lawyer, neither Darrow's courtroom performances nor his politics define his career or enduring importance. Going well beyond the familiar story of the socially conscious lawyer and drawing upon new archival records, Kersten reveals that Darrow was an iconoclast driven by the rising interference of corporations and government in ordinary working Americans' lives. In the face of the country's inexorable march toward modernity, Darrow dedicated himself to smashing systems of social control, fighting for liberty and individualism everywhere he went.

Jose Francisco Torres was born and raised "up the river" above Trinidad, Colorado and his life spanned from the cowboy days of the late 1800s to the technological era of the late 1900s. Despite the security of his home in the rural Spanish community, there was something lacking: opportunity and respect for his people from the outside world. Early on, he conceived the notion that this was wrong, that he and his people deserved better and, as a child, he felt prompted to do something about it. The question became what and how? Discrimination was everywhere and he had neither money nor support to assist him. But with faith and determination, and to the dismay of his parents, he set out to prove it could be done. Refused entry into law school because of his background, he refused to be stopped by the rejection. This chronicle of the hardships, gains, setbacks and wins in the life of this man details what he felt and what he accomplished in his lifelong battle against prejudice and for equality. In the process, he lost his first love, battled a deadly disease, crossed with the Ku Klux Klan, gained a law degree, defended the poor and disadvantaged, married his Crusita and reared three children, took on the political establishment, joined every civic good cause that came his way, and became the Honorable J. Frank Torres, "the only honest judge we ever had " Lois Gerber Franke was born and reared on an eastern Colorado ranch where she learned to ride, rope and shoot. She graduated from the University of Colorado and has completed studies from other institutions. After college she lived and worked at jobs in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. She married Paul, an engineer, and lived at Grand Lake, Colorado where she learned trout fishing. The family then moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where she did city planning before settling into a career of teaching high school English and Journalism and coaching the table tennis team. Lois has three grown children and is a compulsive reader who likes horses, dogs, puns, cribbage, lilacs and rainy days. This book springs from her friendship with an intrepid and unforgettable neighbor.

Civil justice has been undergoing a massive transformation. There have been big changes in the management of judicial business; the Human Rights Act 1988 has had a pervasive impact; the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 has effected many changes - notably, the prospective transfer of the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords to a new Supreme Court. Against this backcloth of radical change, this book looks at the recent history and the present-day operation of the civil division of the Court of Appeal - a court that, despite its pivotal position, has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention. It examines the impact of the permission to appeal requirements, and the way in which applications - particularly those by litigants in person - are handled; it looks at the working methods of the Lords Justices and at the leadership of the Court by recent Masters of the Rolls; it considers the relationship between the Court and the House of Lords - looking at high-profile cases in which the Court has been reversed by the Lords. Notwithstanding the impending arrival of the Supreme Court, it concludes that 'the Court of Appeal will remain firmly in place, occupying its crucial position as, to all intents and purposes, the court of last resort-indeed, a supreme court-for most civil appellants.'

A compilation of Washington, DC, attorney Jacob Stein's essays about lawyers, judges, clients, literature, and popular culture. The essays in this volume have previously appeared in Washington Lawyer, American Scholar, the Times Literary Supplement, and Wilson Quarterly.

From the Author:
One of these days a tired lawyer, in retreat from the quickly running statute of limitations, and hiding out in a bookstore as I have done, will discover this book. And it may just happen that one or two of the remarks that follow will remind the tired counselor that the ungrateful client, the unresponsive judge, the damnation of deadlines are all common to those of us who must extract a living from the contention of others.

About the Author:
Jacob A. Stein has been a trial lawyer for more than 55 years. Mr. Stein received an LL.B. in 1948 from George Washington University. His practice includes a wide variety of civil and criminal litigation, particularly the prosecution of personal injury claims. His books include: Legal Spectator & More (2003); The Law of Law Firms (1994); Closing Argument, The Art and the Law (1969); Trial Handbook for Maryland Lawyers (1972-2001); District of Columbia Tort Casefinder (1977 & 1983 supp.); Personal Injury Damages (2nd ed. 1991); Damages and Recovery, A Survey of the Law of Damages (1972).

He is senior editor of Litigation magazine. He is adjunct professor at Georgetown U. Law School, where he teaches an advanced course in the Federal Rules of Evidence. He also has participated in many continuing education programs and has taught in the Harvard Law School trial practice course from 1974 through 1983.

He is past president of the District of Columbia Bar and of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia. He served as chairman of the Local Rules Committee of the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Mr. Stein is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

Complete Table of Contents and links to past articles at LegalSpectatorAndMore.com

Dueling Discourses offers qualitative and quantitative analyses of the linguistic and discursive forms utilized by opposing lawyers in their closing arguments during criminal trials. Laura Felton Rosulek analyzes how these arguments construct contrasting representations of the same realities, applying the insights and methodologies of critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics to a corpus of arguments from seventeen trials. Her analysis suggests that silencing (omitting relevant information), de-emphasizing (giving information comparatively less attention and focus), and emphasizing (giving information comparatively more attention and focus) are the key communicative devices that lawyers rely on to create their summations. Through these processes, lawyers' lexical, syntactic, thematic, and discursive patterns, both within individual narratives and across whole arguments, function together to create versions of reality that reflect each individual lawyer's goals and biases. The first detailed analysis of closing arguments, this book will significantly improve our understanding of courtroom discourse. Furthermore, as previous research on all genres of discourse has examined exclusion/inclusion and de-emphasis/emphasis as separate issues rather than as steps on a continuum, this book will advance the field of discourse analysis by establishing the ubiquity of these phenomena.