This may come as a surprise to you, but law school textbooks do not exist for your personal enrichment and to teach the law. In fact, law textbooks, like most other college textbooks, exist to make money for the publishers and authors. We will explain why instead you should rent law school books.
Aren’t the legal textbooks for my learning? Aren’t these new textbooks keeping up with the cutting edge changes to U.S. legal theory? Won’t I need to reference my law school textbooks throughout my career?
Should I buy my law school books?
The answer to all these questions is no! Let’s talk about what law school textbooks are for, why you should never buy them, and what to do instead.
What Are Law School Textbooks for?
Law school textbooks are for making money for the publishers and the authors. How do we know? Because each year they publish a new version and switch around a few cases so that you can’t use last year’s edition for your classes. But doesn’t the law change? Absolutely not for the majority of the cases you will read – especially during your 1L year. The foundational cases of contract law, civil procedure, property, etc. are foundational for a reason. They are the pivotal change in the law.
This means that these cases aren’t going anywhere. The building blocks of your legal knowledge rest on familiar cases like Pennoyer v. Neff (1878), Pierson v. Post (1805), and many other presidential cases. Even Constitutional Law is mostly older foundational cases. Hello Marbury v. Madison (1803).
The point is, your foundational legal knowledge does not change every single year. The only reason textbooks are updated so frequently is to get law students to pay for a new edition of a book with 95% of the same content as the last publication. Don’t fall for it!
Why You Should Never Buy Legal Textbooks
Okay, now that you know the game, here is why you should never buy legal textbooks. Renting is the much better option!
Instead of spending hundreds (maybe thousands) of dollars on brand new textbooks that you only need for one semester, you can rent your law school textbooks for only as long as you need. This is much cheaper!
How does it work? Simply go to Amazon Rentals and search for your textbook. You will find that renting for one semester is much cheaper. Use the textbook during the semester. Then, when you are finished return it with Amazon’s each to use return system. You don’t have to pay any postage, Amazon does it for you.
Why You should Rent Law School Books
Renting textbooks is much cheaper. Additionally, you will never need your textbook again after you use it for one class during one semester. We promise you! You will never open an old law school textbook to study for the bar, when you have a job, or any other reason. Why? Because you will have other supplements for the bar exam, you’ll have updated legal software to find cases for you, or you will simply use google to find a quick synopsis.
After law school, you will not revisit and read old case law in your textbooks. If you need to revisit foundational cases, you will do so using legal software that allows you to highlight, copy, automatically build citations, and much more!
Frequently Asked Questions about Renting Law School Books
You can do that with rentals. You will not be charged extra for a law school textbook that has been written in unless you absolutely destroy the textbook by ripping pages, damaging the outside, etc.
Absolutely not! This is a lie told by people who never have taken the bar or want you to spend too much money on textbooks. When you study for the bar exam you are given supplementary material that is extremely condensed and to the point. It is essentially only rule statements. You will never read case law to study for a bar exam.
You will never do this and if you do, your clients should fire you. Practicing lawyers have legal software that can access the most up-to-date opinions at the click of a button. Relying on your legal textbook to do legal research is probably borderline malpractice. Legal textbooks do not include all the relevant case law for the jurisdiction you’ll be practicing in. Law school textbooks only have a handful of important cases used for teaching.
You won’t. Why would you ever need to reference a textbook that was specific to one class and one class only?
No. Most of them are pristine and barely opened. First, law school students take care of things for the most part. Second, many law students are lazy and never even open their book to read because they rely on case summaries. So, you may rent a brand new textbook that has never been opened.