The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study

Written over 80 years ago, but highly relevant today, The Bramble Bush remains one of the books most recommended for students to read when considering law school, just before beginning its study, or early in the first semester. Its first edition began as a collection from a series of introductory lectures given by legal legend Karl Llewellyn to new law students at Columbia University. It still speaks to law, legal reasoning, and exam-taking skills in a way that makes it a classic for each new generation.

The new Quid Pro Legal Legends Edition includes an extensive 2012 Introduction by Stewart Macaulay, a senior law professor at the University of Wisconsin. Macaulay updates the modern reader on the book's current relevance and application, offers a practical perspective to new law students, and places the original edition in its historical context. Simply put, Macaulay writes, this "is a book that anyone interested in law schools or law should read."

Llewellyn's pointed and clear explanations of case briefing before class, visualization of case facts, active learning in class, the use of precedent, exam formats, and the limits of logic have proved timeless and highly practical. They remain excellent advice for current students to consider and implement in their own journey into the law. This is no Chamber of Commerce speech of mere platitudes about law practice and the grandeur of the bar. To be sure, Llewellyn believed in law school and legal education, and in dreaming big about a life in the law. But he was—famously—a realist above all, and this book gets to the nuts and bolts of studying law successfully in traditional legal education.

Whether from the enduring nature of his hands-on advice, or from the reality that the first year of law study and its classroom method simply have not changed very much over the years, the book remains, by all accounts, targeted to the way 'thinking like a lawyer' continues in the modern law school.

Now in a high-quality new edition from Quid Pro, The Bramble Bush is part of the Legal Legends Series. It features embedded page numbers from the previous, standard print editions—for continuity of assignments and referencing. Our production uses hyperaccurate checking against the original source—avoiding the misquotes, distracting formatting errors, and omissions common in such reissued classics, even from well-known presses. Only the Quid Pro versions offer these features (even if this description may appear under other publishers' used or new books, or customer reviews that decry the poor quality of other reprintings).

Also in the Series, look for explained and introduced new editions of such classic works as Holmes' The Common Law (called The Annotated Common Law, with some 200 simple annotations to decode Holmes and the law he famously describes); Cardozo's The Nature of the Judicial Process (with extensive introduction by his premier biographer, Harvard Law's Andrew Kaufman); and Holmes' The Path of the Law and Warren & Brandeis' The Right to Privacy (both introduced by Steven Alan Childress of Tulane Law School).