Chapter 31
Reading Texts
Introduction
Delving
Poring
Introduction
This chapter describes how to read legal texts such as secondary and tertiary
source of law. There are, as we have noted, two major ways of reading a text,
poring and delving.
Delving
Sometimes a reader will want to delve into a text for specific information. This
may be their sole object with the text, or it may be done in the process of
poring.
Textbooks should have appropriate devices to enable a reader to extract
information. Stated shortly, these finding devices should cover everything in a
text that a reader may wish to discover. These devices consist of the
following:
(1)
Table of contents.
(2)
Index.
(3)
Special tables. Ideally any important and recurring information should
be accessible by a specially prepared table. In law books, two obvious
examples are the table of cases and table of statutes. Social science books
typically have,
and law books should have, a table of proper names (often to
pick up references to authors and thinkers). Other possibilities are a table of
photographs, a table of graphs, a table of diagrams, and a table of places.
Poring
Introduction
Many readers will wish to pore over a book, that is, to read the text intently.
The core task in doing this is to identify the structure of the text. While this is a
general requirement that applies to reading any text, the nature of part of this
structure, namely the overall structure of the text, varies from discipline to
discipline.
It is necessary to qualify the inevitably general advice here about reading by
pointing out that the way one reads will be affected by the time available, the
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