In brief: Not with § 1, and certainly not with the Preface. It is best to begin with an institution one knows – property, contract, punishment, the constitution of the courts – and to read the corresponding section against one’s own professional knowledge. What Hegel has to say on the substance stands in the rubric For lawyers; here it is a question of the way in.
The quickest way in: the administration of justice
Read § 209 to § 229 – some twenty paragraphs on law, codification, promulgation, judicial procedure, publicity and the weighing of evidence. That is the part of the book which presupposes least and will seem most familiar. You will find that Hegel names problems you know and gives grounds for them that you do not know in this form: the duty of promulgation from the right of consciousness (§ 215), the publicity of proceedings from the universal interest in the right at issue (§ 224), the sentencing range from the impossibility of rational singularisation (§ 214).
The second step: punishment
§ 90–§ 103 are short, hard, and for criminal lawyers the real test by fire. Anyone who after § 100 note has the feeling that something is said here which is missing from the unified theory of punishment has arrived in the book. If not, one has at least read the most quoted passage of the philosophy of right in the original.
The third step: where it hurts
For private lawyers: § 34–§ 81 (property, contract, wrong) – and then the question why Hegel expressly takes marriage out of the concept of contract in § 75 note. For public lawyers: § 257–§ 271 and after that § 272–§ 286, where the derivation of the monarch in § 279 is the point at which most readers get off. For social and commercial lawyers: § 241–§ 256, poverty and the corporation.
What may be skipped
The Preface, on a first reading. It is polemical, presupposes the controversies of 1820 and contains the most misunderstood sentence of the book – on which see „What is rational is actual“. § 1–§ 33 can wait too; they are the conceptually densest part and read much better backwards, from the concrete.
How to use this edition
Each paragraph stands on a page of its own, with the main text, the note, the transcripts of the lectures and, where they exist, the Additions by Eduard Gans. For a first reading the main text suffices; the note repays attention when one wants to know whom the sentence is aimed at. The lecture layer is often more intelligible than the printed text – Hegel spoke to students differently from the way he wrote. More on this: How do I read a paragraph of this edition?
Further on the substance. What does Hegel have to say to lawyers? · Is Hegel’s theory of punishment still of use? · Why is the state not a contract? · What does Hegel have against the historical school of law? · What of Hegel has remained in present-day law? – Literature. Ludwig Siep (ed.), Klassiker Auslegen, Berlin 1997; Klaus Vieweg, Das Denken der Freiheit, Munich 2012.