Choosing books

You will be expected to buy your own copies of any books which are prescribed as essential reading. Student numbers are such that no library will be able to afford to stock sufficient copies of these basic books for every student to be able to borrow a copy.

When your lecturers recommend one specific book (whether it is a textbook, a casebook or a statute book), your wisest course of action is to buy that particular book rather than an alternative. This is because the lecturer will almost certainly have tailored the content of the course with the basic readings in mind, and if you buy a different book it is highly unlikely that it will cover the material in exactly the same way and in the same order as the recommended text. This means that you could waste a lot of time working out if (and where) the material in the designated text is covered in the alternative you have bought. Of course, none of this means that you should not read other books. You will often find that reading more than one book enhances your understanding of a topic, as well as giving you the opportunity of impressing your examiners by saying that ‘while author X argues such and such, it is worth noticing that author Y takes the contrary view and argues so and so’. However, the realities of students’ finances are such that buying multiple texts is, quite simply, not usually an option.

Finally, if your lecturers recommend books which they have written, do not assume that they are simply feathering their own nests at your expense. The economics of academic authorship simply do not work that way. In terms of pounds-per-hour, most academics would be better off spending their evenings and weekends stacking shelves in supermarkets rather than writing textbooks. The real reason why most academics write textbooks is that – rightly or wrongly – they feel frustrated by the quality of the existing books at the appropriate level in their subject areas.