Property and Lawyering, 3d (American Casebook Series) 3rd Edition

This casebook features all of the standard "property" cases but also features cases that are especially of interest to 20-something law students--like the Popov v. Hayashi case. The lawyering exercises are thought provoking. Overall this book is well written.

Blame it on the subject matter or the judges, maybe, but I was not pleased with the editing of the cases in this book. Many cases seemed to include large chunks that other books would have either cut entirely or briefly summarized with one sentence. It seemed far more painful than it had to be and I spent a lot more time wondering why on earth I was reading something than figuring out the rule.The lawyering exercises were interesting, sometimes. My professor actually included something like that on the exam, so I can't say they didn't help in exam prep, but they seemed strange when the book will be used by 1Ls who won't remember a thing by the time they're actually "lawyering" and who will probably never practice real estate. It's a nice change of pace but they don't help the meat of the book.

not sure if this is the best book in the world but i needed it for school

Half of the pages were not bound & had to be glued together.

Good book!

The book has heavy heavy highlighting and is barely usable.

Not that this review will affect your decision to purchase or not, because if you're in law school and are assigned this book, I don't think you're going to get out of buying it unless you can somehow find commercial outlines and briefs specifically keyed to your class/textbook, which I certainly had no luck with. Regardless, in the year that I've been in law school thus far, this was perhaps the worst book that I have had the displeasure of slugging through.The fact that this book is well-organized judging from the table of contents and in how it arranged the topics is the best thing that I can say about it. In another Amazon review, the user wrote of the second edition that "the editors here don't attempt to chisel the cases down to the substantive matter. As result, the reading is often tedious and unhelpful." ([...]. If that was the case then, it certainly hasn't improved a whole lot in the 3rd edition. The cases are still tedious to get through, which makes it difficult to derive the rule of law from.The book also suffers from having "lawyering exercises" that really are not that helpful to a first-year student who is taking Property and being exposed to law for the first time. Most first-year students would not even remember these exercises by the time they start working (or perhaps would forget before even taking the final exam for the class). These exercises really don't do a whole lot except take up space that could go into explaining substantive law and interrupt the flow of the textbook.