Letters to a Law Student and
What About Law are the two principal books for school students contemplating a law degree. Feel free to read one or both of them.
However please remember that about 20,000 of your contemporaries will be doing likewise and to use anything from them in your personal statement or interview will be as stale as 2 month old bread.
Learning the Law is better read immediately before starting a law degree.
You may want to think about reading one or more of the LNAT prep books. Some swear by them. Others think they are useless.
My view is that you should be starting to think about law as an abstract idea. You can approach that through jurisprudence, history or fiction.
The
Very Short Introductions are accessible. There are several
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/nav/p/category/academic/series/general/vsi/R/browse+within+this+series/law/n/4294921792.do?sortby=bookTitleAscend&thumbby_crawl=10&thumbby=25 and to these please add Nick Vincent's recent one on
Magna Carta. Tom Bingham's
Rule of Law and, although they are over thirty years' old, Tom Denning's series of four books starting with
The Discipline of Law are readable.
Eve Was Framed and
The Justice Game are radical critiques of the legal system by leftie lawyers. Both of them have the faults of champagne socialists patronising ordinary people but if your background has not exposed you to serious left wing thought, they may be useful. One way to crash and burn at interview is to assume your own prejudices are the only possible viewpoint. No similar criticism of the legal system has been done from the political right for about 70 years.
If you approach this historically, Brian Simpson's
Cannibalism and the Common Law is a serious work of legal history but readable without specialist knowledge. It examines what happened when three shipwrecked sailors ate their cabin boy. Dame Veronica Wedgwood's
Trial of Charles I is still the leading account of the central event in English political history. If you can find a copy
The Ayes Have It is a very funny account by Alan Herbert of his successful attempt to become MP for Oxford University and pass a private members' bill reforming the divorce laws.
On the subject of fiction; anything but
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Bleak House, all 800 pages of it, is
the legal novel but
Pickwick Papers and
Sketches by Boz are easier going. For something a little more modern I have always liked Leon Uris'
QB VII. Most Victorian and many 20th century serious writers produced at least one novel or play with a legal plot, Most of the plays have been filmed. Bolt's
A Man for All Seasons is probably the best.
At the end of the day, you are not going to be questioned about your knowledge of law but it helps if you look a little more interesting than the other 1200+ applicants.