Steven L. Emanuel
Steven L. Emanuel J.D. is an author of law outlines and law school study aids. He is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School.[1] He was admitted to the bar in the U.S. states of New York, Connecticut, Virginia, Maryland and Massachusetts.[2]
Education and His Outline Business
Steven Emanuel started writing legal study aids to help fellow JD candidates while still a law student at Harvard in 1974.[1][3] He tells how he could not understand his civil procedure professor, decided to write up his own outline of the subject, which ran over 100 pages, and eventually stopped going to class. He gained a solid grasp of the subject by composing the outline, emboldening him to then sell it to his fellow students at a profit that paled in comparison to the effort taken to produce it. The balance between effort and profit shifted later on as the size of his customer base grew. Students were drawn by Emanuel's concise style and straightforward outline format.
It is of interest that Steven Emanuel's father, Lazar Emanuel, was himself a lawyer and law school advice author.[4] Some time after Law School, Steven Emanuel founded Emanuel Publishing Corp. Under this umbrella organization he merged several series of study aids. These include CrunchTime, Law in a Flash, and Strategies & Tactics. His organization also eventually acquired the Siegel's series of law study aids. In 1995, Emanuel Publishing entered into an exclusive joint venture with Lexis-Nexis to make law outlines available online.[5] In 1996, he started to create preparatory materials for the Multistate Bar Exam in coordination with the Princeton Review.
One critique, expressed in the Washington Monthly, of the Emanuel Outlines and other similar summary guides is that they may oversimplify legal issues in order to make them more palatable to students and keep down the length of legal guides. For instance, Emanuel's 2008 Intellectual Property outline (author Margreth Barrett, Hastings law school) gives three pages to international copyright treaties. A copyright casebook by Gorman and Ginsburg, also intended for students, devotes an equal amount of space to an introduction and history of the subject. Only then does it launch into specific description of copyright treaties. Emanuel contains no discussion of features common among the treaties, showing how being brief does not always clarify the legal matter at hand.
News Article
A New York Times article (July 22, 1994, pg. B9) described the origins of the Emanuel outline publishing business. The article has been reproduced in its entirety below. Article text copyright New York Times.
By Bruce Shenitz
- When the newest crop of law school graduates takes the bar exam next week, their heads will be crammed with the teachings of America's legal giants: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Learned Hand, Benjamin Cardozo. There may also be a few stray thoughts from a lawyer in Westchester County named Steven Emanuel.
- Though he does not sit on the bench and neither practices nor teaches law, Mr. Emanuel's study materials have been the mainstay of law students nationally for nearly two decades as they prepare for finals and bar exams.
- One of the frustrations of law school is that even if students read all the assigned cases and take copious class notes, they can still "come out of it without the foggiest idea of what the operative, generally accepted principles of law are," Mr. Emanuel said in a recent interview in his Larchmont, N.Y., office. Emanuel Law Outlines, he said, try "to bring some order to that chaos" by laying out some of those principles.
- Students who are still fuzzy about the differences between murder and manslaughter after plowing through their assigned cases can turn with relief to Mr. Emanuel's two-page capsule summary explanation of the two.
- Big on Required Courses
- Mr. Emanuel acknowledges that his series is not the best seller of the legal study aids market. Though no one tracks the sales of such guides, managers at several bookstores around the country specializing in law texts agreed that Gilbert Law Summaries, which have 37 titles compared with Emanuel's 11, was No. 1 in sales.
- But they said that for the required courses like constitutional law, civil procedure, contracts and torts, Emanuel is the leader. Bernadine Dziedzic, manager of the Chicago Law Book Company, a retail and mail-order bookstore, said Mr. Emanuel's outlines are "concise, clear and to the point."
- As popular as the books are among law students at both elite and not-so-elite schools, law professors are more cautious in their praise. Many argue that the only good course review outline is homemade. A few will sometimes recommend one to their classes.
- Michael Zimmer, a professor Seton Hall University School of Law, said that such materials "can be helpful, but they can be a hindrance if students stop there rather than form their own understanding of the course material."
- Still, it can be difficult to look down on commercial outlines when no less a name than Prof. Arthur Miller of Harvard Law School is the co-author of a civil procedure review for Gilbert Law Summaries.
- Mr. Emanuel got his start 20 years ago, the result of what he calls a "really incoherent" professor in civil procedure in his first year at Harvard Law School. He said he prepared an outline so that he could understand the course and sold 110 copies at $6 apiece. (Most of his guides now sell for $16.95.) During his second and third years he wrote outlines of other courses.
- After graduation in 1976, he joined Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, a small New York firm, where he practiced corporate law and litigation. But he continued to write course outlines and within a couple of years, he said, "the business seemed to be throwing off enough money that even at that moment, it would pay the family bills."
- He Is His Own Writer
- He stopped practicing law in 1978 and set to work on his guides full time in New Rochelle, near his home. In 1986, he moved to more spacious offices in Larchmont, where he now has eight employees, including his father, who serves as the company's general manager and general counsel.
- Mr. Emanuel says that he writes all the texts himself, which distinguishes his series from the other commercial outlines. To prepare a text, he barricades himself with four or five major case books, standard reference works for the subject and computer data base updates on new cases.
- Writing five to six hours a day, he says it takes him at about a year to finish a book. An outside lawyer critiques his manuscripts; two Columbia University law students are working this summer on updates and revisions of four of the texts.
- With annual sales of about $2 million, the company provides Mr. Emanuel with an income he says is comparable to that of classmates who are partners in Wall Street law firms.
- There is an added fillip. "I take a lot of pleasure from the fact that virtually every lawyer in America who is being admitted to practice nowadays or will be admitted in the future will have been a reader of one or more of my books," he said.
Family
He is married to Marilyn Doreen Mandel Emanuel (since June 1976), and they have five children, born from 1977 to 1994.
Later career
The entirety of Emanuel Publishing Corp. was sold to Aspen Publishing in 2001.[6] Steven Emanuel is still responsible for spearheading all edits and revisions to the Emanuel study aids and is a lecturer in the Wolters Kluwer / Aspen publishing bar review course.[4]
References
External links
| Persondata |
| Name |
Emanuel, Steven L. |
| Alternative names |
|
| Short description |
|
| Date of birth |
1950 |
| Place of birth |
|
| Date of death |
|
| Place of death |
|