This book describes not rules of law but rules about law: tools that lawyers use to lawyer. It is meant to show serious legal assistants and law students how lawyers practice law.

A law school education is more one of learning about the law than memorizing the laws. Our legal system is so vast that no single person can be familiar with every law on the books, but most can learn to use the tools that lawyers and judges use for analysis, interpretation, and application of those laws. Knowing of the rules of law distinguishes a lawyer’s approach to a problem from the layman’s. Normally, legal education and training is task-specific; i.e., particular to an area of specialization. That focus is necessary and appropriate, but the novice requires a foundation of knowledge about the legal method – the tools – used, regardless of which area of law is involved.

The object of this work is to distill three years of law school experience (and many years of practice) into a compact manual that describes how judges and lawyers, well, judge and lawyer. It specifically covers the intrinsic and extrinsic guides to statutory construction, the guides for analysis and use of case law, and the basic guides to contract interpretation, as well as what is implied. Its primary purpose is to explain the fundamental method of analysis of any legal issue by discussing the tools for extracting meaning from legal texts.