First-Year Tips: "How to Read a Legal Opinion"

Now that the Brooklyn Law School 1Ls have gone through orientation, this is a good time to suggest reading Professor Orin S. Kerr’s How to Read a Legal Opinion (available for downloading at SSRN's Legal Scholarship Network) published in the Autumn 2007 edition of the GREEN BAG, An Entertaining Journal of Law, Vol. 11, No. 1, p. 51. As stated in the abstract, this popular essay "is designed to help new law students prepare for the first few weeks of class. It explains what judicial opinions are, how they are structured, and what law students should look for when reading them." SSRN is available on the Brooklyn Law School Library Database page. To download the full text of the article on SSRN, registration is required.