Legal Skills

The best-selling legal skills textbook in the market, Legal Skills is the essential guide for law students, encompassing all the academic and practical skills in one manageable volume.

It is an ideal text for students new to law, helping you make the transition from secondary education and giving the skills you need to succeed from the beginning of your degree, through exams and assessments and into your future career.

The first part covers 'Sources of Law' and includes information on finding and using legislation, ensuring an understanding of where the law comes from and how to use it.

The second part covers 'Academic Legal Skills' and provides advice on general study and writing skills. This part also includes a section on referencing and avoiding plagiarism amongst a number of other chapters designed to help you through the different stages of your law degree.

The third and final part is dedicated to 'Practical Legal Skills'; a section designed to help develop transferable skills in areas such as presentations and negotiations that will be highly valued by future employers.

The text contains many useful features designed to support a truly practical and self-reflective approach to legal skills including self-test questions, diagrams and practical activities. You are given the opportunity to take a 'hands on' approach to tackling a variety of legal skills from using cases to negotiation. Each skill is firmly set in its wider academic and professional context to encourage an integrated approach to the learning of legal skills.

Legal Skills is accompanied by an innovative Online Resource Centre offering a full range of resources including:
- Video clips of good and bad 'real life' moots in action bring the subject to life
- Guidance on practical exercises and questions from the book so you can test yourself on essay writing, problem solving, revision and exam skills and compare against example answers with commentary
- Lecturers can track student progress using an online bank of 200 multiple choice questions offering immediate answers and feedback that can be customized and loaded on to a university VLE

Emily Finch, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Surrey,Stefan Fafinski,Research Fellow, University of Leeds

Emily Finch is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Surrey where she teaches Criminal Law, Evidence and Legal Skills. She has been a lecturer since 2000 and has won several awards for her teaching. Her overarching research interest is in public perceptions of crime and criminality and the impact of technology on criminal activity. She has a particular interest in jury decision-making and has conducted a number of empirical studies that explore factors that influence jury verdicts in rape, theft and fraud trials. Her work on identity theft won the Joseph Lister Award in 2005.


Stefan Fafinski is a Visiting Fellow in Law at the University of Leeds and a Research Associate at the University of Oxford. He has lectured on various undergraduate and postgraduate law topics since 2005 and has taught undergraduate cyberlaw and cybercrime. He is interested in the social factors that influence the misuse of information technology and the challenges that the Internet presents to the criminal law. He won the Joseph Lister Award for his work on the social aspects of computer crime in 2006.