Law School Confidential (Revised Edition): A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience: By Students, for Students by Robert H. Miller Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Law School Confidential (Revised Edition): A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience: By Students, for Students
Book Review: A must have for perspective law school students.
Summary: 4 Stars
This book has a few contradictions on dorm life and studying but overall the book is a must have. It takes you from prepping for the LSAT all the way through. It explains what to expect and prepares you for somethings may not have known about. The great thing about this book is it is not dry and boring. The author keeps it light, funny and interesting.Book Review: A must read for any future law student
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is a must read for anyone considering going to law school. It gives you the ins and outs of law school from applications to orientation all the way through the bar exam. It includes everything from study tips to information about your resume and interviewing at law firms. I would definitely recommend reading it before even applying to law school because it will really challenge you to think about your reasons for wanting to go to study the law.Book Review: A must-read for those in, or interested in, law school
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is a work of genius by the main author Robert Miller and his co-authors (all law school grads), who bring to bear a wealth of experience, knowledge, and savvy. For the small price of a paperback book, you get much more than $12.89 worth of information. The book starts from scratch, how to prepare for LSATs and apply to law school, then moves into how to succeed in school (including preparing for class and doing well on exams), and rounds it out by massive amounts of advice on the job search. Spectactular resource. As a law student, it helped me gain confidence before beginning my first year. Go out and read this book if you're in law school, applying to law school, or even vaguely interested in law school.Book Review: Achieves a bare minimum of usefulness
Summary: 3 Stars
For a book with a fairly simple subject and a fairly easy way of tackling it (i.e., commonsense advice), this book manages to contradict itself a lot. It tells you that your first and foremost job is to be sure you're ready to answer when you're called on in class, then it tells you sixty pages later, "do not prepare for class"--except it does it in all caps. This is the most glaring of such inconsistancies; others include advising you to live in the dorms your first year, then saying that you made a mistake living in the dorms once finals come around. He tells you to spare no expense and inconvenience to buy a really comfortable bed, then suggests a couch/futon to save space. And so on.
Couch/futon? Dorm life? That's right: in a fairly obvious attempt to stretch this book out to decent paperback length, the author focuses on some really mundane issues. He spends a page and a half extolling the virtue of having fans (you know, those electric things that spin to make cool air blow around) in your dorm room. Sure, it's probably a good idea to buy a fan. Maybe some of the author's readers won't have the gumption or the know-how to go buy a fan when their dorm room gets hot, so maybe it's good he mentions it. But spending a page and a half on electric fans seems a little much, especially when he spends no more than a page each giving an overview of what first-year classes are like. His advice about taking the infamous "logic games" section of the LSAT is even more brief: "practice them." (He then goes on the recommend Kaplan and Princeton Review, for which there is no excuse in my book.)
The main selling point of this book is the author's study "system," a complex, multicolored mess of highlighting and scribbling that takes commonsense notetaking, puts it in technicolor, and makes it complicated so it looks good in print. There are good study tips to be gleaned here, but his "system" is just silly--and I'm sure anyone who's taken the author to heart and given it a shot has abandoned within a week.
But to give credit where it's due: law school prep books have got to be one of the nastiest genres on the market, and any author is going to resort to nasty tricks to stretch the page length. It's almost refreshing that this book's tricks are so transparent. This book does have something going for it that many of the others out there don't: it covers, though usually *very* minimally, the whole legal education process from LSAT to your very first all-growned-up job. That overview in itself is of great use to any prospective law student who didn't already know it, and it comes across fairly clearly in this book.
Unless you're crazy enough to actually try to do everything this author tells you to do, then reading this book won't hurt you, and it will probably add to your growing knowledge of what law school is all about. Just don't expect any miracles, from this book or any other in the genre.
Book Review: An indispensable law school guide!
Summary: 5 Stars
This was a great book. I'm about to start my senior year in college, and I didn't start considering law school seriously until earlier this year. However, after reading this book I am sure I made the right decision. Law School Confidential offers a balanced perspective, and there are personal anecdotes from people who loved law school, people who hated it, highly paid corporate attorneys and those who chose the less glamorous but arguably more fulfilling private practice/public interest jobs. The other great thing is that this book walks you through the application process, as well as offering an action plan and description of what to expect from each year of law school.