ABSTRACT
The core of legal studies is, or should be, the primary legal text. However, it is also necessary to competently handle secondary legal texts – textbooks, journal articles, newspaper articles.
Books about law are consulted, in panic or at leisure, for a range of reasons:
• to obtain a general grasp of an area of law;
• to obtain a description of a topic;
• to obtain a range of different views about the same case/statute/area/theory/method;
• to obtain a sophisticated analysis of a topic or case, and so on.