Book excerpt: This casebook is ideal for any introduction to law or legal method course. It is designed to develop analytic, interpretive, and advocacy skills that will be helpful to students across the range of substantive courses, while also encouraging students to think critically about the judicial process and the role of judges in a democracy. The second edition of Elements of Law significantly reworks and updates the first edition, which was published in 1994, while preserving the essential features and many of the principal cases from that edition. This edition is more compact than its predecessor because the lengthy materials on jurisprudence have been eliminated. Thus, half of the book is devoted to the common law and half to statutory interpretation.