Whether you are an advanced law student looking to review the basics, or an aspiring law student looking for head start, this course will help you build the foundation you will need to succeed in law school and beyond. This course will introduce you to terminology, concepts, and tools lawyers and legal academics use to make their arguments. It will help you follow these arguments—and make arguments of your own. This course consists of a series of short lectures and assignments. A reading list complements each lesson, providing you with a roadmap to help you explore the subject matter more deeply on your own. Although the lessons may cross-reference each other, they are modular in nature: you should feel free to approach them in whatever order fits your schedule, interests, and needs.
Postscript
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Из курса от партнера Yale University
A Law Student's Toolkit
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Ian AyresWilliam K. Townsend Professor
Yale Law School
[MUSIC]
Congratulations for making it through these lectures.
You've now had an introduction to some central concepts.
As you encounter these concepts again, and again in Law School.
You'll naturally become more adept at manipulating them.
But having an initial understanding is very likely to help you digest the rules
that you encounter in your class materials.
Of course, there's some arbitrariness in what gets included and
excluded in any attempt at defining a canon of foundational concepts.
Bob Dylan wrote the song, A Hard Rain Is Going To Fall,
during the midst of the 1962 Cuba missile crisis, and
said that its lyrics were the initial lines of all the songs quote,
he thought he would never have time to write, unquote.
In this postscript,
I'm gonna mention five more tools that I didn't have time to include.
More information about them is just a web search away.
So first, flow charts.
Flow charts lay out the disjunctive, conjunctive elements of a cause of action.
Rule 403, probity versus prejudice.
This rule tells you, it's a rule of evidence that tells you that there's
a basic tension between some pieces of evidence that are both
relevant and provide probative evidence, but also might prejudice the jury.
I think of as a canonical example, a bloody photograph.
The next rule I didn't really have time to talk about is Men's Rea.
The states of mind are very important to several areas of law.
If you innocently misrepresent something, you're not a liar.
And the categories of Mens Rea include willful, wanting, malicious,
intentional, gross negligence, negligence and non-negligent.
But for versus Proximate cause.
X is a but for cause of Y if Y would not have happened if X had not happened.
But there's also this concept of proximate cause,
it's something need not be just a but
for cause in order for there to be legal liability.
You also have to have it, something close in the causal change.
So my parents conceiving of me was a but for
cause of me giving these lectures, but it's not approximate cause.
The next tool I really couldn't talk about is arguing the alternative, and
here its a very lawyer-ly task way of thinking.
If you're accused of murder.
You might respond, I didn't do it, but if I did I was drunk.
And if I wasn't drunk, it was in self-defense.
Arguing in the alternative.
Rhetorical advices.
These like the cannons of interpretation often have fancy Latin names.
It turns out that Ward Farnsworth has a great book on these two.
You can at least decorate your conversations about when you
can recognize that somebody is using a particular rhetorical device.
And once you know them, it's easier for
you to deploy them yourself in your writing and in your oral advocacy.
I wish I'd had time to teach you about some specific rhetorical devices.
Like the canons of interpretation,
rhetorical devices often have fancy Latin names.
It turns out that Ward Farnsworth has a great book on these too.
If you learn a few of the core devices, it will allow you
to first of all recognize when someone is using them in their argumentation.
But also gives you a greater capacity to deploy them in your own writing and
your own oral advocacy.
So, there are of course many, many more tools.
But having this introduction to the 30 or more rules that we've already gone over,
you're in a much better place to go out and start learning them yourself.
Thanks for sticking it out with me.
[MUSIC]
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