FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Thanks to one University of Arkansas School of Law professor, a literary classic of legal education has been brought back to life and updated for a more contemporary time. Stephen Sheppard, the William H. Enfield Professor of Law, has written a new introduction and notes for The Bramble Bush: The Classic Lectures on the Law and Law School, a set of legal lectures originally penned by Karl Llewellyn in 1930.

Sheppard said the book, released this month by Oxford University Press, is one of the most famous books written about legal education. It presents a particular way of thinking about law school and provides law students with the tools to be successful during their three years of training.

The book originated from lectures that Llewellyn developed to introduce Columbia Law School students to the study of law.

In the introduction, Sheppard wrote, “Llewellyn is introducing students to four things – an idea of what the law is, a technique for reading cases, a technique for preparing for class and an understanding that justice in the real world is essential to law.” 

Sheppard said Llewellyn’s ideas and educational methods have provided a foundation for the teaching styles used in today’s law schools.

“Llewellyn is known as one of the most influential legal realists. He believed the law is what people do with rules, not just the rules themselves,” he said. “This book is important to law students because it was the first to describe the way American lawyers still view what the law really is.”

While Llewellyn’s original text remains, Sheppard said his edition features more tools for readers to work with, including an index, bibliography and scholarly notes.

To prepare for writing the introduction and making other notes, Sheppard said he studied Llewellyn’s biographies written by N.E.H. Hull and William Twining, read the lecture notes that Llewellyn used to write the book and visited the archives at the University of Chicago where Llewellyn taught later in his career. He also read about New York City’s cultural history in the 1920s to understand the “popular color” of Llewellyn’s lectures.

“The research for this project was a real treat – biography, cultural history and a chance to show the reader around the intellectual fights of the Roaring Twenties,” Sheppard said. “This was the idea of law that set up the New Deal, the Great Society and our current state, but it came from the world of Freud and Holmes. Great stuff.”

Sheppard, who graduated from Columbia Law School in 1988, said he was taught in a modernized style originally set in motion by Llewellyn.

“My first law school course was based on professor Llewellyn’s lectures; it still sets up the habits and skills for lawyers throughout their careers,” he said.