Criminal Procedure: Examples and Explanations

Rating:
Summary: Great supplement but bad teacher
Review: I just used this book to help me study for my CrimPro exam. I thought it was very, very helpful, but only because I had read my casebook and attended class all semester. Unlike Glannon's CivPro E&E (which is a MUST-BUY for any 1L), this book would not have been valuable if I had opened it during the semester; it was only valuable before my exam as a review. It does not provide insight into why the Supreme Court decided certain things; it simply gives us the rules the Court spat out with a miniscule amount of justification, if any. Your casebook and professor would likely discuss the reasons why the Court decided the way it did and why the concurring or dissenting justices reasoned the way they did.

Thus this book does not give you a complete view of Criminal Procedure. But that is not what we are supposed to expect from study aids and supplements such as this. For what this book is supposed to be, a supplement/complement to the work you've already done, it is excellent. So make sure if you buy this that you are buying it for the right reasons. If you need a book explaining CrimPro in detail, then you should probably read your casebook.

I do have to say, however, that the hypotheticals are excellent and give you a good feel for what kinds of essays you might encounter on your exam. They allow you to walk through your analysis, exactly how your professor would expect you to, from start to finish.

Rating:
Summary: Not a helpful study aid
Review: This book was a real disappointment compared to others in the examples and explanations series. Most of the examples were simply cases that if you had studied at all you would already know. If you didn't bother to do the reading for your class, then maybe it would be helpful.

Rating:
Summary: Really Good Text. Great for Exams.
Review: This is a book and series that I would recommend to any law student. One of the problems I have found about law school is there is a lot of reading without very much learning. The essence of it is that the case method doesn't work and the practical skills you lack are blaring on the first day you show up at your job.

The nice thing about this book is that it acknowledges that the cases don't do you much good unless you understand how they affect the client or his circumstances. This book is filled with examples and answers for each type of case you study. This proves extremely, extremely, valuable when its time for the exam and you are looking at fact patters.

In addition, I have hated previous guides because they don't recognize that we have gone to class and we need a new way to look at the issue. This book gives you short introduction, so your not reading twenty pages before actually trying to learn something.

The only weakness with this book is that Crim Pro is almost exclusively constitutional law and not statutory. As a result, the brevity of text I just praised makes it a bit difficult to see how cases at times might work together. This becomes a little more apparent when you switch from issues with the Fourth Amendment to issues with the Fifth. While the two work together much of the time, I wanted more of a line in the sand.

This book is great though if you are using it with a casebook. You will be very glad you bought it. I would also highly recommend this book to those of you who freeze up in exams. The examples in this book will allow you see the fact patterns before and save you time under pressure.