Master Conspirator Eugene Volokh has suggested that we might do some posts giving advice to entering law students. I don't have much to add to what I said in this 2006 post on the subject.
However, I will give one new piece of advice: don't automatically believe everything you hear about the "right" study methods for learning the law. From the first day of law school, many people will tell you that studying law is radically different from studying anything else and that you need to use all sorts of time-consuming new methods just to keep up. For example, some will tell you need that you need to outline every case you read in great detail or that you have to buy lots of commercially produced study guides.
It may be that some or all of these things really will help you get through law school. But you may want to consider the possibility that you can study law more or less the same way you studied other liberal arts and social science subjects as an undergrad or graduate student. With relatively minor modifications, I got through law school using the same study skills as I had used before. Lots of others have done the same thing. Many people achieve excellent records in law school without tedious new study methods, and without ever so much as glancing in a study guide other than the assigned readings. It can work, and if it does, it'll be a lot less aggravating than the alternatives.
Different people learn in different ways. My approach to studying may not work for you. So I'm not saying that you should necessarily do what I did or that you should reject study guides, detailed outlines, and the rest out of hand. Just approach the task with an open mind, and don't assume that the only way to survive law school is to adopt the time-consuming study methods many people will try to foist on you during your first year.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Advice for Entering Law Students:
- Advice for 1Ls: What If You Don't Know the Answer?:
However, when I finally started my college career last semester, I found the posts here (especially by Prof. Kerr) almost as helpful as my textbooks. With that in mind, don't overlook non traditional sources while studying.
According to the rumors floating around after the survey, the results royally messed up whatever thesis about the benefit of long hours of study that the grad student was hoping to prove: He ended up with a graph with the GPA on the X axis and hours spent studying on the Y axis, that plotted a nearly perfect bell curve. Or in other words, the law students who spent the least time studying were at the very top and bottom ends of the class rank, with study-heavy "grinds" disproportionately ending up with only middling grades.
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I upgraded them to the extent that I was spending roughly an hour to an hour and a half studying for each hour in class. This was all I could do; I work full time.
I did just fine with those study skills, leaving me convinced many of my fellow students are *seriously overworking* and stressing themselves out to the point where it makes things harder for them.
The one thing I learned quickly was not to write up the cases on separate pieces of paper at first. I annotated the casebook to death instead, and not just with highlighter. Fine-tip pens in different colors are the way to go. Holdings are one color, rules are another, things you have questions about still another. You can write notes to yourself in the margin with the same pen.
This works well if you are fairly visual and use color to organize your paperwork in general. An added benefit is that you can often find things just by glancing down if a professor catches you on something you can't quite recall. If the holding of a case is always green, and nothing else on the page is...
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Does this include only your prep time, or all of the other time including writing up your outlines and reviewing past material and studying for the final?
Some teachers advised to spend this much time as prep time. I'll note. I certainly didn't. For the first semester of the first year, I tried to do as much class prep as possible. After that, as little as I could get away with. I spent a lot of time with commercial outlines, past student outlines of students I could trust (those who got good grades in the class) and writing, typing up my class notes and creating my own outline. For me, preparing for class was the least important thing in terms of learning the material. And I did as little as I could get away with because I was expected to be prepared for class and didn't want to be caught with my pants down which happened on more than one occasion. "Pass!"
Even if you want to trust the study skills and techniques that got you there, you start to worry that seemingly everyone else is putting in 12 hour days, 7 days a week. You figure they must know something you don't, and with so much riding on first year grades, you find yourself driven to put in the hours, even if you don't quite know why. It's almost unavoidable first year. All the advice in the world usually can't overcome that contagin.
Then by second year, you hopefully realize that some classmates are just overworking it. You focus on the classes you find interesting, and slide through those you find boring. Hopefully pick your schedule to maximize the former and minimize the latter. Have a pretty nice two years comfortably studying topics you find interesting with professors and fellow students from which you can learn...and understand that it sure beats working at big firm by a long shot.
And as for studying during the semester, read the cases just well enough so you understand what's going on in class, but don't go OCD over them. Doubling the amount of time you spend plowing the cases and notes won't give you very much additional payback. Instead use your free time to stay sane -- go for a run, watch the Big Game (if you're at a Division 1 school, at least), pay attention to your significant [or insignificant] other, and get to know your fellow students outside of class - in the lounge, the pub, at law-related extracurriculars, or wherever they hang out at your school that isn't the library (which is the epicenter of 1L paranoia and to be avoided as much as possible when you're not actually using it for legal research).
And don't panic at finals time. I loved the scene in Paper Chase where all the students went berserk then, and the protagonist had to isolate himself from them to get his studying done. I would suggest that there is nothing more self-destructive than panic at this time.
I used highlighters to do the same thing that A.C. did - six colours in all, for judge/procedural posture/holding, dissenting opinion, arguments made by each side, precedent cited, facts, and reasoning.
Could not agree more to use whatever study habits have worked in the past. It's kind of weird how law school turns seemingly rational people into witch doctors. If you dance in a half-circle in the morning, make a ritualistic sacrifice at the hands of the god Emanual, sweat and toil in the library until dawn has broken, and take essence of Glannon before finals time, and thou shalt please the gods of the law. Omit the essence of Glannon, and condemn thyself to a lifetime of document review.
By the final year, I may have had it down close to one for one. My grades didn't drop, but I could get through more in less time.
It's like anything else. First figure out how to do it at all. Then figure out how to do it efficiently so you have time left for other areas of life.
If you are taking 15 credits, the total comes to 45 hours a week -- more when papers are due, but less when the reading assignments are shorter or less complex. That's a pretty reasonable work week if you get up at a normal hour and work without too many long interruptions.
Oh, and don't wait till the very end of the term to start outlining. Not much point in starting until you have accumulated a few weeks' material to work with, but start by the middle of the semester at the latest.
I'm not sure that it's bad to wait until the end of the term to start outlining, though. This is probably one of those "different strategies will work for different people" things.
don't cram-you probably already knwo the stuff (most people do) cramming will just wear you out and ruin your one chance to show you know the stuff.
* Review commercial outlines to gain familiarity with the subject. Cases only is not the most efficient way to determine what the cases at teaching.
* Read as many cases as you can.
* Do not brief cases - it is waste of time. It may help you when called on, but the time saved is well worth the embarrassment when stumped in class.
This made my brain hurt. Is it a 3D graph or what? How'd he fit GPA, hours spent studying, and the number of students, on one graph? If the number of students (in a particular window of time spent studying and gpa) wasn't a variable, how would a bell curve come out?
Although my hero was our dean emeritus, who according to legend won the "triple crown" when he was a student at that same law school many years earlier -- valedictorian, moot court competition winner, law review EIC -- PLUS was a member in VERY good standing of the law school drinking/social club. I'm guessing he didn't even bother buying all the assigned casebooks, let alone reading them.
It depends on who wrote the outline. If it's an "A" student who wrote a really good outline for the class, I found those to be quite useful. But I would never rely on that as the ONLY thing. Rather, I'd use it as a reference when constructing my own outline.
Worked while going to law school at night, as did all of those in my study group. Kept in touch with them over the years as well; having lunch with two tomorrow, as we celebrate our 25th graduation anniversary.
Just like the real world, when something needs to get done outside of the normal hours you put in the time to get it done, but don't make it a habit. Once you get into the mindset of "if 4 hours of study is good, 8 must be better" then you have lost all perspective. There is a point of diminishing returns from that grinding effort and I think it comes much sooner than most believe.
I agree with the suggestion about staying away from the library, particularly around exam time. The odor of fear and anxiety is palpable and that is the last thing you need.
As for commercial study aids, I found them almost completely useless and after about half-way through the first semester I never looked at another one.
Generations of The Saint's students recognize this description. He was unique. His reputed ability in his younger days to toss 'em down while staying the smartest and most pleasant guy in the room was the stuff of legends. But he's not to be recommended as a study habit model for new law students. Occasional bouts of intense sobriety are almost as important to law school success as multi-color highlighters.
When pressed for time (I worked full time during law school)I frequently used the table of cases in a hornbook as a way to identify the key legal issues before reading cases. I always, always turned first to the opinion or dissent written by Justice Black, who wrote wonderfully clear prose. I never did an outline, which still strikes me as a waste of time, or joined a study group. I thought it would be much better to discuss cases with the professor than with students.
With regard to how I actually studied, I managed to do respectably at a top tier law school by paying attention in class and then reviewing either commercial study guides (particularly the "Nutshell" books) or other people's outlines.
Wear protection?
In order to do well in law school, you must how to write your exams in the most efficient and professor-pleasing way possible. Keep in mind the obvious (yet seemingly overlooked) fact that you are being graded on your ability to answer questions in an exam, not your ability to study or create massively detailed outlines. If you make yourself learn how to write efficiently for your very first law school exam in torts (or contracts, or whatever), it will continue to pay dividends as you take your last final in the spring of your 3L year (though, of course, it won't be as important then).
As I learned the hard way, good exam writing is about more than just learning how to use IRAC, issue-spot, and do good analysis. You must learn how to make efficient use of your time, only spending as much time on a particular issue as is warranted by its weight in the professor's grading scheme. It cannot be emphasized enough that law school exams are extremely time-constrained, and you must budget your time wisely.
To learn from my example: I had several classes where I didn't pay much attention in class and felt like I knew and understood less than many of my colleagues, but I would do very well grade-wise, as I would run out of things to say about a particular question on the exam within a reasonable period of time and move right on to the next question. Conversely, there were a few classes where I felt I understood the subject matter thoroughly, but I would spend so much time going through legal minutiae in the first, say, two questions in a three question exam that I wouldn't have but perhaps twenty or thirty minutes on the third. The result would be extremely high marks for the first couple of questions, abysmal marks on the third, and a middling grade (or worse) in the class. I either failed to see just how much time had elapsed, or I just couldn't bring myself to stop the analysis at a reasonable point on the earlier questions, and it cost me dearly.
I wasn't the only one with this problem. We had a guy in our class who was an honest-to-goodness genius. He was going to a top flight law school and a top flight medical school at the same time, was the recipient of all kinds of academic scholarships, and, from what I heard from friends who knew him in undergrad, had already made a considerable sum of money while an undergraduate through a couple of businesses that he started himself. Nonetheless, he did poorly in his first semester exams, and one of my law school friends tutored him for the second semester on how to take law school exams effectively. According to my buddy, who looked at the guy's first-semester exam answers, this guy had excrutiatingly detailed (and brilliant) analysis in the early questions and would rarely get to answering the last question at all.
It sounds simple, but in the heat of exam-taking, you can forget to look at your watch.
One of the lazier students in my torts class many years ago got called on by the prof to do a classic case recitation. He basically read from Emanuels. The prof realized what he was up to, and innocently started asking questions about facts not in the commercial outline (which suggested the prof was also intimately familiar with the outline, but that's another story). After about 3 such questions, the prof launched into a Kingsfieldian diatribe that was rather humiliating for the student, and drove home to the rest of the class that engaging in Socratic dialogue with reference sources other than the assigned casebook was potentially hazardous to one's GPA, if not one's health.
M Go Blue: You guessed right - St. Antoine. Relevant to new law students, I once heard him give a witty but fairly accurate description of what to expect on a well-written law school final exam (direct quote as best I can reconstruct it 20+ years later): "Answering law school exam hypotheticals is like peeling an onion. You pull back each layer and there's always going to be another layer underneath to deal with. And nobody can get to the middle without crying."
That sounds like my crim law professor. he went so far as to determine whether you wrote Gilberts or Emmanuels sounding like material in your final exam and those were often the students he gave the "Ds" to. Me I got a good student outline from the year before and that helped quite a bit.
It's all about learning the material and taking the exams well. Do whatever you have to do to learn the material and take the exam the way the prof. wants it taken. So figure out what works for YOU, not for the person freaking out next to you.
And M Go Blue or whatever you call yourself, I also graduated from Appalachian State. I'm still savoring the taste of deep-fried Wolverine a year later, especially as I live in the heart of big ten kuntry.
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