Jethro K. Lieberman

Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, 2013, 176pp.

For students studying constitutional law, this book explains, in language easy to grasp, what the subject is about and how to learn it. Read it before beginning the course, or in the early weeks: it will help you mentally organize what you're studying.

The basic subject of most first-year law school courses is easy enough to grasp, but for too many students constitutional law seems different and much more difficult to pin down. The Constitution contains a hodge-podge of commands, permissions, and restraints, often only obliquely connected.
      Unlike such first-year staples as torts and contracts, in which the factual settings are relatively stable and, in many ways, repetitive, the cases that arise under the Constitution spring from a vast array of activities having little or no apparent common thread. . . .
      The range of legal issues encompassed by the Constitution is large indeed. If you think about the Constitution simply as a grab bag of unrelated provisions, the study of constitutional law may well confuse and exasperate you. You may ask, in the midst of that confusion and exasperation, why you are being forced to study the subject. . . . The reasons for studying constitutional law are straightforward. Constitutional questions lurk in almost every field of law and legal practice. . . . [And] in fact, constitutional law does have important unifying principles. If you grasp these, you will be well on your way toward mastering the subject as a whole without feeling overwhelmed by the number of seemingly discrete and unrelated topics.