This law school text teaches the fundamentals of legal writing, analysis, and the American legal method. It fosters critical lawyering skills, such as how to identify a legal rule from a variety of sources, analyze and explain its components, apply the rule to answer a problem, and communicate the results in an effective manner. In the second edition, coverage of authority and rule formation have been streamlined and tightened. The authors have increased the visual appeal and content of callout boxes, charts, and tables; and they have replaced and shortened the length of examples so as to provide two to three times as many samples of practitioner writing in each chapter. With this new edition, the authors endeavor to train future lawyers to be ethical and professional issue-spotters, analysts, counselors, problem-solvers, and communicators working to advance their clients' interests.