Washington Post Op-Ed: Summer Reading Suggestions for Law-Students-To-Be

George Mason University Law School Michael Krauss offers an list of books for newly admitted law students to read over their summer vacation.  Interesting selections, both expected and unexpected.  Here are a few of his recommendations from his recent Washington Post Op-Ed:

1. Truman Capote, “In Cold Blood,” 1966. Capote’s masterful account of the 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter and his family in Holcomb, Kan., “In Cold Blood” is a study in evil. It is also a provocative examination of our criminal justice system and capital punishment.

 

2. Brooke Goldstein and Aaron Eitan Meyer, “Lawfare: The War Against Free Speech,” 2011. “Lawfare,” the use of litigation as a weapon to silence and punish an opponent, is a significant challenge to free speech and rule of law today. Bad lawyers created lawfare; good lawyers must combat this subversion of the goals of our profession.

 

3. Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” 1960. Read this high school favorite again, and this time focus on the jurists: the judge, the prosecutor and defense attorney Atticus Finch himself. Did Atticus react ethically to the racism of the system? How should you behave, as a lawyer, when presented with a case of flagrant injustice?

At least a couple of the selections, including the Federalist Papers and the reasons for suggesting B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two, strike me as uniquely consistent with George Mason Law’s approach to “law and economics.”   But I also suspect that even seasoned law professors could benefit from any of these relevant, if perhaps unusual, summer “beach” reads.