Why?

For $1,692.68 in books and your time, you can gain a solid base understanding of a wide variety of legal topics. This base understanding should serve as good introduction to many areas of law so that you can know better how to conduct yourself and your business and know when you need the assistance of a bona fide attorney in your jurisdiction.

Any person can represent themselves; That is a natural right of all people. However, to act as representation for an entity other than yourself, one must be a bona fide attorney. In most states, the process to become a bona fide attorney is to attend an accredited institution, earn a Juris Doctor degree (usually called a "JD"), pass a professional responsibility exam, pass a bar exam, pass a character and fitness exam, and then formally apply to be admitted to the state's bar.

There are currently only four states in which it is possible to become an attorney, it is possible to instead "read law" instead of earning a JD. In California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington a person needs to read law under the mentorship of a practicing attorney or judge for some amount of time and they may start the exam process.

The fact that most states require applicants to their bar to have earned a JD, necessitates that those applicants have the ability and opportunity to finance earning a JD. In the most affordable case (in-state tuition at a public institution), the nationwide average cost of earning a JD is $82,773 (based on current average yearly costs). This means that applicants either must take on debt to finance this education or have the ability to finance this themselves. In addition, these applicants must also have the time to devote to earning this JD. Having both the time and economic resources to allow qualified and ambitious individual to pursue a JD is a rarity among most of the population. This sets up a scenario in which the people most able to be earn a JD and become bona fide lawyers are people who come from a position of privilege. However, given that ability is uniformly distributed while opportunity is not, this implies that many people who would make excellent attorneys are unable to do so due to a lack of opportunity. This also means that the people who are the most able to become attorneys likely have not experienced firsthand the difficulties that the less-privileged suffer under the law.

I believe that this lack of opportunity and the secondary effects of self-selection of life experiences that create attorneys is wrong. In order to help address this issue, I've put together a legal education primer to help enable opportunities for people with ability and ambition.

Audience

If you have a stronger than casual interest in the law, or maybe are considering law school in your future, then this resource is for you. I am not an attorney myself, but I have a stronger than casual interest in law and don't mind somewhat blindly leading others through a self-directed course of study.

Course of Study

In most three year JD programs, the course of study is something like the following

Year 1

• Civil Procedure - Pleading and Practice
• Constitutional Law - Structure
• Contracts I and II
• Criminal Law
• Property - Fundamentals of Ownership
• Property - Transactions and Land Use
• Torts

Years 2-3

• Civil Procedure - Jurisdiction
• Constitutional Law - Rights
• Evidence
• Legal Ethics
• 2 research projects with corresponding writing components

Self-Directed

In this self-directed course of study, we're going to instead focus on laying a good initial base layer, and then we'll build on top of that by digging into certain subjects. Our order will be as follows (and by all means, feel free to work through each text in an order that matches your own interests):

1. Constitutional Law.
2. State and Local Government Law (Eighth Edition)
3. The Federal Courts and The Federal System
4. Studies in Contract Law
5. Criminal Law and Its Processes
6. Property: Principles and Policies
7. Secured Transactions in Personal Property (Ninth Edition)
8. Wills, Trusts, and Estates (Ninth Edition)
9. Patent Law and Policy

For each book in this list, We'll be doing a close reading of the material, one section a week. We'll take running notes as we go, and try to distill each section down into easily digested pieces. Each week, we'll address all of the points of discussion raised in each section of each book, and the resulting written work products will be published under the appropriate pages on this site and emailed out to subscribers.

We will refer to Black's Law Dictionary and The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation regularly during our readings, and it would be prudent to have them readily on-hand.