Your first year grades will depend primarily on how you perform on your final exam. Accordingly, the best possible use of your time, in preparing for that exam, is to take practice tests. Your professor probably has some previous exams on reserve in the library; if not, exams from other professors who have taught the same course are probably on reserve. Related Posts (on one page):
Practice tests will help you with time management when the real exam comes around, and get you familiar with the format. So when you take the final exam, you should have completely figured out how to write an exam essay. The typical first year law school exam is very different from essay questions in college. Your job in the law school exam is simply to spot the relevant legal issues in a particular factual context, and explain the pro/con arguments that are relevant to analysis of the legal situation. Beautiful writing is not important. You are just presenting an organized listing of how the law might be applied to a given set of facts.
You absolutely should not wait until the final weeks of the semester to begin your practice exams. Within a few weeks, you will have covered enough material so that you can answer at least some exam questions. For example, if your Torts class is one semester, you will probably be finished with intentional torts no later than early October. At that point, you can practice the essay on a Torts exam which covers intentional torts. (A typical exam might have one essay on intentional torts, one on negligence, and one on strict liability.)
By the end of the third week of school, you should begin outlines for your classes. After three weeks, you will have completed at least one discrete section or subsection in all of your classes. For example, in Torts, you will have finished assault, and the class will have moved on to other intentional torts.
If can get ahold of Bar Review outlines for your classes, do so. Sit down and read through them. Your objective is not to memorize the contents. Rather, you are engaged in pre-reading. If before you read a non-fiction book, you closely read the table of contents, your comprehension of the book itself will probably be better. Likewise, reading a bar review outline will give you a good overview of the subject, and help you understand where a particular day's class fits into the context of the subject as a whole.
A final tip: there is a vast difference between the first year of medical school and the first year of law school. In the former, students must learn an enormous number of facts. But the substantive content of a first-semester law school course is rather thin. The full content of all the black-letter law that you will learn in, say, first-semester criminal law, could be taught in a semester to a bright group of seventh graders. The main thing that you are learning is not the law itself, but how to analyze legal problems: how to spot legal issues in a factual pattern, and how to make pro/con arguments. That's why taking practice exams in September will not only make you a better exam-taker in December or January, it will also make you a better student in October.
And BTW, this is advice is not about working harder than your classmates. It is about working smarter. You should definitely have time to go to campus football games, do whatever sports you enjoy, go out drinking and listening to music on weekend nights, etc. The amount of time wasted by hard-working but inefficient first-semester law students is enormous. To wit: investing a huge amount of labor (rather than just a lot of labor) in a pass/fail writing class; using hornbooks to excess (a hornbook is fine to use to clarify a legal concept you don't understand; you should not use a hornbook to learn extra law, unless for your own intellectual curiuosity. All the law you need to know for the exam is in your casebook); creating an overly detailed, 200 page outline (100 pages, at most, should be plenty for a single semester class, and some classes can be done in 50); obsessively studying the details of cases for fear of not being able to answer a question in class (spend as much time as you need teaching yourself how to read a case; after that, you should not need to read most cases more than once to extract the legal rule(s) from the case. Except in constitutional law, there few if any cases for which remembering the facts of the case will do you any good on the exam).
Tips for new law students: Take practice tests, and start your outline now!
P.s. I really know nothing of the law...well..I thought THE PAPER CHASE great fun. And a lawyer relative of mine said that law school was divine. Great fun. But that the practice of the law sucks.
What he didn't say is that reading the old tests and paying attention in class will tell you the prof's bias and how to spin your responses. Getting the magic phrases down [ex: duty; breach; causation; injury] will get you a pass, applying it to say that gays (or whatever he loves) are great in a super lib's class will get you the A.
Supplements are superb, here. Perhaps you think you understand Assault. Then a Supplement challenges you to say what result if someone shouts "Watch out! Incoming missile!" You duck, are honestly in fear of contact... but it was all a prank. What result?
When you're reading or watching news, tv or moviews or talking with people and you start to spot some legal issues you've learned, you're pretty much catching on. When you can't turn this skill off, your only friends will be other lawyers.
Law students don't know what is important about a case, when they start reading them. So they think everything is important -- otherwise, why would it be in the casebook?????
Prepping yourself with an outline allows you to see the case as intended -- a central holding, usually expressable in a sentence or two, coupled with analysis.
Some might argue that there's some virtue to puzzling out, on your own, the key holding of a case. In my experience, it's really just a way for Professors to hold everyone in suspense before making it look easy with a few remarks.
For an analogy, few people suggest that you prepare for the LSAT by reading complicated books and doing newspaper jumbles and don't look at an actual LSAT until a couple of weeks prior.
The only thing in my mind that might fit everybody is not to fall behind on the reading. Even then, someone who reads fast and retains information very well could even ignore that.
My other piece of advice would be: relax.
However, I do agree that practice exams are the number one way to study. Another note: Actually practice writing full exams, both in and out of time pressure. Don't say you'll "outline" the answer and move on. Actually write a full essay.
Outline answers are what everyone will have. It's how you fill in the details that makes your essay stand-out.
Also, if your prof teaches from the same outline every semester (like a certain property prof at GULC), the copy shop around the corner likely has a copy of it that (a) everyone else in the class is working off of and (b) will make your life easier as well. It may be missing a couple of things, but those are easy to catch and fill in if you follow the class discussion.
BTW, we haven't discussed the benefit of commercial outlines. Granted, they can be anywhere from overrated to irrelevant (I remember buying some outlines that were only 25% useful to the professor's text), but they can have some merit, can be useful as a model on how to outline, and do have helpful practice tests and answers.
My study group and I played Trivial Pursuit with Emmanuel's flashcards. We found them very helpful AND entertaining.
The best way to prepare for exams at this point is to READ and BRIEF every case. Simple advice, but even just a few weeks in it becomes painfully obvious that the number of students who do this declines steeply and steadily after the first week. Annotate your briefs during class discussion. I found it most helpful to brief and annotate without a laptop. In fact it seems like it would be difficult to effectively take notes this way with a laptop.
After Halloween, you might start preparing an outline, which really is largely a synthesized and distilled version of those annotated briefs, informed by the syllabus. You simply cannot start that synthesis until you have some idea what you're doing.
Save the practice tests until you have come close to completing your outline. Otherwise you will undermine your own confidence and make the exams stale before they're really useful.
If you can get ahold of the professor's old exams, they're the single best supplemental study resource, especially if you also have access to some "A" exam answers -- and some professors DO make available not only old exams, but also sample answers.
Although I remember a situation where a professor got lazy and re-used a very old evidence exam question, apparently forgetting that the law review kept a file cabinet down in the basement that contained copies of virtually every old exam he and most other profs had ever given. The professor had a bit of a problem when, 5 minutes after the exam ended, all the review members in his class trudged into his office to confess that they'd not only seen the question before, but they dissected and discussed it in depth in their study group.
So, I had high hopes for my first year when I went to law school. My grades were good my first year. But I was miserable, and don't feel as if I learned as much as I could have.
I blame all the advice. It's not that the advice is bad. It's just that the sheer volume of it focuses the mind on strategic grade grubbing rather than learning. And you feel guilty that you don't manage to follow all the advice. I don't think there should be a moratorium on advice, but I think that most of it should be prefaced with the warning "This is just strategic BS. This is meant to be used in addition to actually trying to learn something, and should not be taken as a substitute for actually trying to learn something."
I mean the law school exam essay is not a format I've ever seen a real lawyer make use of so it's not like it's important to practice that particular format. Moreover, if this was merely about effectively teaching students to write or absorb new formats then practicing that particular format shouldn't be necessary. For instance if you switched up the length of the essay on exams so students never new what to expect it seems you would evaluate all of the writing skills desired without mixing irrelevant issues of studying that format into the mix.
I mean ultimately for the students studying is all about relative advantage. Creating exams on which it is useful to practice essays of one particular length necessarily takes student time away from other types of more useful studying and into mastering a specific format that is neither theoretically important nor practically useful once they leave school.
------
Not that this means you can just up and change it. I'm running a calculus class this term and the types of exams we are required by tradition to give there are even less useful than what you describe here. I'm just wondering if there is some justification for this.
But isn't strategic grade grubbing the whole purpose of law school?
I'm willing to agree with that, but I still like to think that the strategy of trying to learn something is often as effective, and always more satisfying, than the strategy of figuring out how many different colors of highlighter you should use.
I tried keeping an outline as I went once and it really didn't help me at all. Same went for writing full case briefs for everything I read.
YMMV.
While I'm very good at synthesising information, and have an excellent memory, I really hate putting things off. Work that could be done earlier (although in a more time-consuming fashion) becomes exponentially less appealing to me as time went on. For me, outlining early kept my stress in check, which seemed as good a reason as any to do it. (I also bribed myself with a Thanksgiving trip to Florida if I kept on top of my work.)
The Sox won the World Series my 1L year, so I spent far too much time watching them make the comeback of all time against the Yankees. Was very glad to have started outlining at the end of August, because there was a lot of cushion in my study schedule.
The one downside to this approach is that your classmates will spend quite a bit of time quoting a certain scene from the Paper Chase at you.
By second year I had a system, and by third year I could manipulate that system at will to make room for paper deadlines, job interviews, and extracurriculars. Outlining as you go is fine later in law school, especially in fields where you are taking your fourth or fifth class. But even then, it isn't essential to do it at any particular time. Set up time for it when you HAVE the time.
I recommend reading and briefing every case, and if you "book brief" be thorough. No need for multiple highlighters, just understand the case and its reasoning. I took copious notes in my classes (on Microsoft's OneNote program) and also participated considerably (hopefully without being annoying).
The key for me, though, was reviewing my notes after each class (or at worst at the end of each week) to make sure that they were accurate (e.g., didn't omit words like "not") and that they recapped the important points. If not, I would add any additional information to my notes before it left my mind forever (a benefit of using the computer). Later in the semester, once you get around to outlining for the class, this step becomes less important because you can just incorporate your class notes into your updated outline. If you spend eight hours a day at school (including class time) with minimal goofing off and work some on the weekends, this is easy to do.
Thus, by the time I got around to outlining in late October and early November, I knew my class notes were complete and comprehensive, thereby allowing me to select the most important and relevant material for the outline. (And I didn't copy and paste from my notes. I retyped all the relevant material, but I just learn better that way.)
Once this was complete, it was all practice exams, whether from my school's database or a commercial supplement. (By the way commercial supplements are great if you are having trouble understanding a concept. But they may contain a lot of information you didn't cover in class, i.e., information that likely won't be tested). If the exam database didn't have questions re: a particular topic that we covered in class, I'd make up my own question with multiple angles and then answer it, so that I could get used to writing about the topic.
So I disagree with DK re: timing. If you have done all of the above, its perfectly fine to wait until the last 2-3 weeks to begin practice exams.
Ultimately, like Guest 2L, if you approach class with a desire to learn the material and you actively think critically about the law and its implications beyond the case you read (i.e., those pesky hypotheticals), then you'll do fine.
This advice was given to me by someone who finished first in his class, and it has paid similar dividends for me.
This is BY FAR the most common way I see law students wasting their time and effort. If I could give my 1L self advice, I would tell myself not to give a crap about looking dumb in class. It just doesn't matter. E.g., some professors like to grill you about the procedural posture of the case, but they will never ask you about that on the exam (assuming it's not a procedure class, of course). A lot of law professors are jerks who just want to put people on the spot. They like to watch you squirm. Look them in the eye, shrug your shoulders, and say you don't know the answer, and all their power is gone and they will move on to the next person. And you can focus on what is really important.
Incidentally, don't necessarily dismiss Dave Kopel's early approach -- since class rank is being bandied around to bolster the bona fides of various study techniques, his suggestion pretty obviously worked for him. Rumor has it Kopel did somehow manage to graduate in the top 5% from a top-10 school, magna cum laude, Order of the Coif, Law Review. And had enough free time to be a freelance writer for the university's daily newspaper, plus work on at least one Presidential primary campaign
Not everything works for everybody. I recommend updating your outlines every week, then compare to a friend's. Trying to write essay exams as early as possible makes sense in modular courses like Property (Adverse Possession!) as well as Torts. I'd wait on Contracts for a while, because each essay question should cover the course from beginning to end.
Developing the mindset to argue both sides takes time for those not used to it, as does using all the facts available, multiple times if possible. Doing practice exams really helps here.
Whatever you do, do not add stuff from a commercial outline if your teacher didn't cover it. Usually there is a polished outline floating around for your class/prof, written by some OCD sufferer. Use that outline to backfill any holes in your own.
Then try to boil your outline down to 30 pages. For closed book exams, boil it down to a single page that you can jot down on a sheet of scratch paper as soon as the exam begins. This will reassure you that you are not leaving out any issues, because after an hour or so of heavy analysis, your ability to recall the course outline will be reduced.
Repeated working of practice exams will get the outline into your head. Play games where you write down issues and use every fact. Write down a flow chart for the Erie analysis.
Don't spend a lot of time outlining exam answers. List issues, then go back and add the elements, then match facts to elements.
Kindly profs will be willing to look at a sample essay or two. Wait til you feel you've produced something fairly good before you ask for this favor.
Often exams combine multiple choice questions with essays. People good at seeing both sides will suddenly freak from the responsibility of finding one right answer. Do practice questions from the MBE bar prep books to get comfortable with this format.
This is admirably specific; based on my casual observations, I am confident in about 10 percent, and inclined to disagree with the vast majority of it. Could you explain the empirical basis for your opinions? I'm sure you draw on your experience in law school, and that you've chatted with other lawyers and law students about these topics -- that is, you're in as good a position, at least, as your average law school grad. I also see by clicking on your profile that you co-taught a seminar ten years ago. But there may be more to it than that: Have you taught first-year courses or otherwise assessed them, and carefully compared the strategies of students who were successful and unsuccessful? If so, it might be helpful in assessing the advice.
No one has substantially greater or lesser authority based on his or her own performance. Suffice it to say that those who do well in law school are often unable to exclude that other strategies would have worked for them, and those who do poorly do not know exactly what would have worked for them. Some improve their performance, but usually change lots of variables at the same time, and they are usually redressing weaknesses specific to them. The least number have the authority to extrapolate from their experience so as to sow concern and confusion among the many eager for a clear solution.
In fairness to Dave, when he took his 1L legal research and writing course 25 years ago, it was graded pass/fail. And nobody with a pulse failed. And the small group portions were largely taught by work-study 3Ls, not professors. It simply wasn't a course one stressed about. I hear it ain't like that now.
Although I think the basic point Dave was trying to make, that too many 1Ls spin their wheels with very inefficient and misdirected study efforts, is a good one. He's correct when he says "You should definitely have time to go to campus football games, do whatever sports you enjoy, go out drinking and listening to music on weekend nights, etc." And I have it on very good authority he did all of those non-curricular activities, and more.
1. I think it is tremendously important to remember and understand the facts of the cases and how the facts framed an issue and drove a particular legal outcome--in other words, how judges actually think and react. Law school exams are invariably written with a factual scenario where the two cases you read appear to have diametrically opposed legal holdings. Just knowing the legal rule and regurgitating that X and Y cases appear to be directed to this issue and their legal rules cannot be reconciled might be accurate, but it is a "B-" answer. The key here is to understand the facts that matter versus those that don't.
2. I think of Bar review materials as hornbooks. So to the extent it is unwise to read hornbooks for extra law, it is similarly unwise to read bar review materials for that purpose. Hornbooks are a real mixed bag. In my view, they can help a "C" student get a "B"; but they can be counterproductive and lower an "A" student to a "B" too. By listing legal principles and encouraging regurgitation, they ensure you won't do too badly; but it also ensures that any particular answer will not truly shine.
(First point: Take every bit of advice with a grain of salt; stick with tactics that work best for YOU.)
For me, outlining *is* studying for the exam. And that's best done within the few weeks before the exam so that you actually remember what you've studied. It's the act of outlining itself that actually prepares you.
Similarly, good practice exams are difficult to come by, especially if the professor hasn't been teaching for many years. And a practice exam is only useful the first time you look at it. Therefore, a student shouldn't take a practice exam until the outline is at least mostly finished. (This isn't to say that a student shouldn't practice issue spotting throughout a semester, but that requires fact patterns, not "real" old exams.)
Also, a student with just two weeks of law school under his belt doesn't yet have a clue what the big picture is. In fact, most students are probably still learning how to brief cases at this point. Trying to write an outline without a good view of the big picture -- at least half a semester worth of the subject -- is just about worthless.
Law school is not the practice of law. You game the LSAT test and diversity essays to get into the highest ranked school you can, to get a better job. You game the heck out of your first year's grades to get a better job.
You must recall that almost none of the profs have ever practiced. Most of them, at most, did brief checking and filled out opinions to a judge's outline. Then, they got hired at the U because they wrote a good note in the review in law school and were clerking for a really respected judge or a really liberal judge.
Once there, they help on a brief every few years, and appear in court even less. They have no idea what the practice of law is, and make no attempt to make their classes fit.
Law school, and the admissions process, are a two and one-half year gaming process to get positioned for the rest of your working life. Actual law in most cases will be learned first at bar-bri and later at seminars and on the job.
You game the admissions process with a lot of study and work, you game and study your butt off the first year, and then you game and edit your butt off to get on the best journal you can. Then you switch to chill mode for the rest of law school while you wait to start learning the practice of law.
They teach actual law with an eye towards practice, send the students out for internships, and fail about 1/3 of the students out.
Those who pass, hit the bar exam ready to go out and run a general practice of law.
Law school isn't a trade school. The first year as taught in tier-1 schools is largely about the theory of law. You're not going to learn how to probate a will, take a deposition, or file a motion for directed verdict. Consider 1L the foundation upon which one's later learning (including learning during one's career) occurs. Perhaps the emphasis on 1L grades is a bit perverse in that context, but a definitive ruling on that topic is above my pay grade.
A cautionary anecdote on assumptions about law professors without practice experience: When I was a 3L, in one of the then-Dean's student meet-and-greet sessions some of my comrades expressed a sentiment similar to yours. The Dean asked us to name the most practically-grounded professors. I mentioned Jerry Israel. Then the Dean asked me to name the most head-in-clouds, divorced-from-reality professor [name withheld to protect the guilty]. The Dean, in what was clearly not his first "gotcha" on this topic, explained that Israel had never actually practiced law (other than occasional pro bono gigs), while the other prof had been in government and private practice for 11 years before joining the faculty. The difference? Israel made a point of actually talking to line prosecutors, public defenders, and even cops (and sometimes bringing them in to team-teach seminars with him), and thus learned how things worked "in the real world." While the other prof taught law as a branch of pure philosophy, for better or worse. So one-size-fits all conclusions about tier-1 faculty may be an oversimplification. Probably even more so today, when practical clinics are a bigger part of the curriculum than back in the dark ages when I was a Hutchins Hall inmate.