Like the first-year classes, which commingle teaching the substance of important bodies of law with the technique for making or resisting novel legal arguments, first-year exams test for the ability to identify the legal questions and recite the body of law you've learned, as well as to spot and argue about novel legal issues In an imaginary case. These skills are not unrelated to the business of being a lawyer. If you're going to advise people and argue on their behalf, you have to know if what they're doing is forbidden, permitted, or required in most of the areas where law applies at all. So you'll need to know the rules about crimes, injuries, agreements, wills, and all the rest. You'll need to know when their behavior invokes different applications of law, so you'll need to be able to see a contract problem or whatever in the story they tell you. After all, clients' stories rarely come in neatly labeled "tort problem" or "potential criminal liability." Finally, much of life is undecided by law, so you'll need to be able to predict what the law will do when your client's novel situation is before it.
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This being said, legal problems rarely require lawyers to answer these hard questions in three hours after they are presented without ever being able to open a lawbook or consult with a more experienced colleague. So traditional law school exams only weirdly imitate life. Moreover, almost every law school requires its first- year teachers to grade on a curve. If you look at the grids for who gets into various law schools, you will see that all first-year law classes cluster at the middle on both grades and scores. So law schools take several hundred people whose grades and admissions test scores are almost identical to one another. For example, UCLA's 1996 admits were almost all between 160 and 169 on their LSATs and 3.5 and 3.75+ on their undergraduate grade point averages. Then the schools give them their first-year exams and they redistribute them according to their performance on the exam along a scale of A to D.
In separating you from the sources of answers and forcing most people to fail, it's no wonder the first year of law school feels like the societies we envisioned before there was a legal system. It sort of is a war of all against all. A Minnesota student who is also a trained accountant picked up the essential arbitrariness of law school life. "There's a scant difference between a twelve answer and a thirteen answer, but it makes a big difference [in your class rank].''The University of Chicago's Dean of Students made the same point to me in an interview: "The grading system by exact numbers exaggerates small differences." The difference between "the sexes, according to Dean Ciuzeii,"however, is that "men are angry and think the professor was stupid. Women think they're stupid. And they give up." Over a point difference.
But not all of them give up, and they're the ones you want to keep your eye on. The indomitable Ms. Daughter didn't give up: "I got mediocre grades the first year and [when] interviewing the second year they never got past the first-year GPA. [But thereafter] I ended up writing onto law review and being coordinating articles editor and getting amazing grades." Studies of women's success reflect Daughter's story; they conclude that women close the grade gap with men a lot in the second and third years. By the time Daughter graduated, she had beaten thousands of other law graduates for one of the most prestigious placements in the legal profession. As she put it, "Rapidity is rewarded and rapidity is a function of how much you need to unlearn." Many women, like Ms. Daughter, do better after three years than after one.
Here, too, first year exams are harder than the actual act of practicing law. Even the fiercest law firms give people more of a chance to succeed than the first year does. In practice, lawyers assume that complex problems take time to analyze and express, that people work better in teams than alone, and that much of law practice is getting people to work out their problems rather than kill each other. Sure you have to work hard and give the impression that you're working hard, and make human connections that will enable you to bring business to what is an increasingly business- oriented profession. And your partners would rather pocket the profits than share them with each other or with their associates. But law firms have no structural investment in redistributing 80 percent of their associates to the bottom of the barrel, to "lick their psychic wounds." Ultimately, the more you rise, the more the firm benefits, and even the most rapacious firm has to reward its bottom sufficiently so the people won't quit and go to work for legal aid. The profession is replete with data on how hard it is for women to practice law, especially in firms, and do the domestic work (the "second shift") at home. But as a matter of purely practicing law, just as women do better after three years in law school than after one, women have the opportunity in the legal profession to do better after thirty years than after three.
Ms. Editor found a different way around the system than Ms. Daughter did, by emphasizing her strengths--writing and arguing: "I had a very strong education and good writing coming in, and I use writing as an alternative to speaking." She sought out seminars and courses with papers as often as possible. First year success is almost always determined on the basis of formal exams, however. When asked how she did on her exams, she repeated, "writing ability; I don't know how to score on tests."
But while writing ability is hard to learn, if you don't already have it in plentiful supply, there are ways to score well on tests. Remember all the techniques you learned from the Princeton and Kaplan people for scoring on the Law School Admission Test? Studies have shown that the LSAT predicts nothing as well as it predicts success in the narrow world of closed-book exams in common law classes the first year in law school. So it stands to reason that there are methods for raising your scores on those exams, too. Fortuitously, some of the ways of doing well on the exams also serve you during the first-year class preparation.
The Material of the First-Year Class
The typical law school class will likely involve a casebook and some supplementary materials. More progressive teachers often have their students read material beyond the casebook to remind them that the cases come from the outside world. For example, for years I gave my civil procedure classes the story of the multiparty action following the terrible flood in the Appalachian town of Buffalo Creek as a way to put meat on the bones of appellate opinions about how cases are tried. There is a set of trial situation films in evidence class. My legal ethics class watched The Verdict, A Few Good Men, and some other courtroom dramas. But mostly you're going to be reading casebooks, collections of appellate opinions that, among them, describe an area of the law, and that include notes to point you to the other directions in which the law was or might be developing.
I was amazed as I went around the country interviewing at how inarticulate the students were about the all-important art of studying in the first year. When asked how they had succeeded, for example, no one in my group of Arizona interviewees had much of an answer. An older woman from the University of Arizona said, "I just put my buns on this chair and sat there. I never dreamed it would be so hard or that they would care so much about tiny differences. My husband never saw me and my kids had to study in the same room with me and leave messages on my answering machine. At the end of the first year, he [the husband] said he hoped the second and third years would be easier." (They are.) The Arizona woman wasn't wrong about how time-consuming it is. If you do as I say below and brief the cases and go back and annotate them with your class notes and do the reading for the next class and so on, you are not going to have much time for regular manicures or barhopping.
It turns out that study styles and reporting differ depending on the area of the country. Almost without exception, the University of Arizona students reported that despite the seriousness of the older students, among most students there was an overt contest for who studied less, the "didn't break a sweat" school of one-upmanship. And remember the Arizona State students reciting "P = JD" for passing means you're a lawyer. But a Georgetown student reported the opposite: In her school, the guys boasted about hours of booking it, perhaps, she speculated, in anticipation of the norms of the workplace where hours billed are a big part of success and esteem. One woman-an extremely self-confident and very expensively dressed woman from the University of Arizona-volunteered that she thought the top students in her class were guys, that indeed they studied all the time (failing the nosweat contest), and were geeks and nerds. Although they got first interviews at the firms, she reported, they "never" got invited back. Her theory was that women were "more well rounded" and "had other interests" so they made more pleasant interviews and were seen as business getters, which mattered more in their eyes. So she got a good job, even though she didn't have top grades.
I suggested that maybe the guys had the right ideas-study all the time, impress the professors, get good clerkships, and work in New York for $100,000 a year rather than get jobs in Phoenix based on charm. (By the way, the people from the hiring offices at a couple of Phoenix law firms vehemently disagreed with Miss Congeniality. They said that you had to do really well in law school to get jobs-even summer jobs-with their firms.) The University of Arizona woman just looked blank, but the woman from Georgetown picked my description right up, and said that was the guy strategy at Georgetown for sure.
So maybe there might be different styles of successful law student behavior in different parts of the country. Certainly, my interviewees Carol Counselor, Ivy League Law Review, Ms. Too Good for Harvard, Midwestern Law Review, and Ms. Fordham Law Review, all chose not to rely on charm. Instead, they chose to "go to class and . . . participate," "work very hard your first year," and "use [study guides] throughout the semester and not just at the end. Read the case, then read the study guide, big picture as you go."
If you decide not to rest on your "well-roundedness," there are three steps to learning the law first year. Almost all my successful women followed this routine, and although it will come to seem obvious, you're a lot better off knowing the routine in advance. One, make summaries of the cases, called "briefs," from the reading. Second, start to develop an outline of the substance of the law as it emerges as you come to the end of each section of the casebook. Third, join and stay in a study group, especially at the end.
Briefing Cases for Class
David Hricik, a practicing lawyer and legal writing teacher in Houston, whose book I have recommended for the dreaded first year, sets out the two purposes of case briefs: "(a) I never had to reread the case again, and (b) if I were called on in class I could answer likely questions without having to pour [sic] over the case." As you can see from this statement, briefing the cases is instrumental to these two completely respectable goals: learning the law well with the minimum of effort and not looking like a fool in front of your peers.
The brief should look something like this:
- Case title: say, Brown (plaintiff) v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (defendant). United States Supreme Court, 1954.
Studying for Class and Taking Exams
- Facts: say, Topeka maintained two separate public school systems, one for black students and one for white ones, but they were (arguably) equally well funded and maintained.
- Law: The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the states to "deny to any person the equal protection of the laws."
- Hard issue the teacher is likely to be interested in and why it's hard: Do separate, but equal, school systems violate the Constitution? This is a hard question, because the only technical argument for inequality is that separation is inherently unequal and the connection between pure separation and inequality is hotly contested; for this reason, old precedent approved the constitutionality of racially separate but equal facilities.
- Holding: The Topeka school system is unconstitutional.
- Opinion: Separate is inherently unequal. Among other things, segregation hurts the self-esteem of the people from the excluded group, which was historically on the bottom of the social structure.
- Dissent: none.
Hricik recommends the admirable practice of typing in class notes regarding what was said in class about this case, figuring that's what the teacher is likely to care about on the exam, and he's usually correct. At the University of Chicago in the sixties, we learned that Brown was an inferior decision made by an overreaching court that had no intellectual pride in its work, and that any politically "neutral" interpretation of the Constitution would conclude that equal is equal, regardless of the history of slavery and racial caste, and segregated schools are fine.
As nauseating as that opinion was (even in 1967, when I first encountered it), at least typing the class notes alongside the brief of Brown would alert me to the fact that the teacher would be looking for a problem in the source of inequality in a similar case on the exam. For instance, an exam question might ask what if the school segregation were an unintentional by-product of housing patterns? By noting the teachers opinion that Brown rested on a very fragile interpretation of constitutional "equality," I would know the teacher would be looking for me to spot how easily Brown could be limited in its scope. On the exam, I might argue that if humiliation were the source of the low self-esteem, which was in turn the source of the inequality, the Constitution might not forbid segregation, absent the humiliating factor of the city deliberately setting up "white" schools from which black students were excluded.
As to avoiding humiliation in class, the bold form of who's the plaintiff and who's the defendant, etc., is designed to get you through the first part of the so-called "Socratic" ritual with which you are now familiar, in which the teacher asks you to tell the class what the case is about. Just use large-size typeface and print each case brief on a separate sheet of paper, stack them in your notebook and turn to the one the teacher is asking about.
What the briefs won't do is help you answer the real Socratic question, such as whether the unintentionally segregating school district violated the Constitution. For that, you'd need to know whether you thought the Constitution could be invoked to dismantle a society-wide system of racial caste with its roots in chattel slavery, or whether it just does the minimum to avoid the unseemliness of the intentional "whites only" high school. The only hint you have that this is the direction of the class discussion is in the language of the case itself, the contents of the note cases following the main case, and your newly acquired familiarity with the basic philosophical premises underlying the legal system.
By the time you're done with the reading and briefing of all the cases for any section, you've got the raw material for an outline. I'd add a P. S. after the briefs for a whole section of the casebook for the note cases, noting very quickly the issues they raise, as follows: "Note cases [if they do] raise issues of unintentional school segregation, segregation outside the school context, and private school segregation." These follow-up issues are a natural for the exam, and, as I said, if you note them-or even read a few-before class they may help you anticipate what the teacher is going to ask.
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The strange thing about studying for the first year is that essentially you re-create the common law in the areas of the first-year courses. Using your case briefs and following generally the pattern in which each course has unfolded, you will create a little treatise on, say, torts. But you won't just write about torts. If you were to do that, you might just as well buy the canned commercial outlines that are available in the bookstores everywhere or borrow a relatively up-to-date treatise or restatement of the law of torts from the library. You are going to write about your teacher's versions of the law of torts, contracts, etc. Thus, your first-year outline at Minnesota, for example, would consist of Fellows on Criminal Law (which is not a common law course technically), at Wisconsin you would outline Larson on Property, at Chicago you might have Richard Epstein on Torts. Once upon a time somewhere you would have had Hirshman on Civil Procedure.
If you look at your casebook, you will see that after some sort of introduction, the book includes a series of cases for each of the elements of the area of the law in question. In torts, the casebook might have sections on liability, special duties, causation, damages, defenses like contributory and comparative negligence, collective, or enterprise, liability and insurance. These mean, in English, how bad you have to act before the harm you do gets redistributed from the victim back to you (liability), do we owe special duties to anyone or is tort law to regulate everyone's conduct regarding everyone (duty), how close does your dumb act have to be to the harm (causation), how do we measure the harm (damages), was the victim a dope, too (contributory or comparative negligence), and were you a member of the tobacco industry (enterprise liability)? (I don't have to teach you torts, and it's a good thing, too.
This is just a rough example to teach you the lesson I am interested in-how to score on your first-year exams.)
As you brief your way through the cases and notes that comprise each section, rules of law will emerge. In one first-year torts class at Columbia, the teacher taught the students torts in the following way. First, he introduced them to the idea that you should be responsible for your negligent acts. This is interesting, because it teaches the students that the idea that anyone should be responsible for damaging a victim is not a law of nature, after all. Maybe the victim just has bad luck and they have to live with it. After all, every time you drive, you put someone in danger. A big question in this part of the course on torts is whether we will hold you responsible whenever you drive, when you drive without your glasses, when you drive on a rainy day, or only when you speed. Then the casebook covered the competing theories of standards of care-for example, before the legal system shifts the victim's bad experience to the offender, how harmful does the conduct have to be, how likely and how expensive to take care against, what is the person like who makes these assessments, and how can it be proved?
Then he or she digressed to some relationships where the law of torts requires special levels of care or allows an unusual level of neglect. Such areas of increased or decreased liability include obligations not as obvious as the obligation to drive carefully, which every driver owes everyone. They include the obligation to control others-for example, whether doctors are liable when the nut cases they're treating actually do kill their wives, or the duties of landowners, and the emerging issue of causation of emotional injury. Next, the course covered causation, which asks how close the connection is between the defendant's act and the plaintiff's injuries; for example, did an electric failure that put out a light cause a fall down a dark staircase? Causation involves a lot of interesting issues, like the responsibility of any drug company that was one of several manufacturers of a harmful drug for the damage to a plaintiff who can't remember which brand he took. Then the Columbia course turned to the defendant: Was he or she negligent, say, bicycling on a dark road without a reflector, or did they ask for it by buying seats in the end zone of a football field? Finally, torts addressed the hotly contested issue of holding people liable regardless of how many precautions they took, which is a kind of insurance issue. The last issue was damages-how to use money to make a plaintiff whole, punish a defendant, or allocate unexpected things if, for instance, the victim of your myopic driving turns out to be The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.
The best book I've seen on law school exams is Charles White- bread's Eight Secrets of Top Exam Performance in Law School. I can't tell you what they are or he'd probably sue me, but I can tell you what the exams are like, and I was certainly amused to see White- bread recommending the method for doing pretty well that I learned from my legal writing tutor at Chicago in the Dark Ages thirty years ago.
A classic first-year law school exam would consist of one humongous essay question, usually in the form of an imaginary case, like my case of the computer-buying sixteen-year-old, which is so complicated that it contains almost all the issues you've learned about all term. The teacher would ask essentially how the case should be decided. You would sit over this essay for three solid hours, with no books or notes to assist you, trying to answer from what you learned and hastily memorized in the three days prior to the exam.
Mercifully, very few exams are this pure anymore. Usually, a teacher will ask several questions, and you will be able to identify roughly which subject matter of the law you learned is the particular focus of the question. For example, the teacher in torts might ask a question that focuses closely on liability for behavior that seems negligent. An example might be a lawsuit by The Artist Formerly, etc., against a chartered bus driver who drove with a broken windshield wiper on the passenger side of the windshield in a rainstorm. Note that the question includes behavior that might be just on the other side of the negligence line and thus only be illegal under a standard of strict liability (such as if we have a higher standard of driving for common carriers like bus drivers than for drivers in general, and whether a chartered bus is a common carrier), and that would come out differently depending on whether the defendant had any special duties to the plain-tiff, who, in our question, was not a passenger in the bus.
Another question might focus heavily on causation, with all kinds of crazy intervening things happening after the defendant set out with the broken wiper and before he ran into Prince, like paparazzi chasing Prince (intervening third parties) and Prince's driver falling asleep at the wheel (intervening defendant's own agent), and so forth.
Usually, the exam includes a question about a currently disputed issue of policy, like whether it's a desirable development in the law to tag a drug company with damages to pay for Mr. X's ruined liver when all they did was make some pills, which Mr. X may never have taken, since all we know is that Mr. X took somebody's bad medicine. Current hot policy issues change from year to year; when I was in school, the question was whether the Warren Court had violated the norms of good lawyering by striking doyvn school segregation; tort "reform" limiting the way the society distributes bad luck and loss seems hot these days.
KEEP AIM EYE ON YOUR TEACHER'S PROFESSIONAL LIFE
A good way to anticipate the policy question is to see what your teacher is writing about in the course in your field. You can find this out by chatting the teacher up after class ("So, what are you working on these days?"), searching for his or her name in the computerized legal research database you're going to learn about in your course on legal research. In the LEXIS database, the library to find your professor in is called "LAWREV" (meaning law review) and the file is called "ALLREV." Search for your teacher's name and you will get everything she wrote and everyone who referred to her. The first is usually the most important.
The second way to figure out what your teachers are likely to ask about is to pay attention to what they emphasize in class and in supplementary materials. What do you think I'd ask about on a contracts exam or a criminal law exam, now that you've read this book? Might it be theories of competency and responsibility in Contracts? Might it be theories of restraining the violent impulses of the strong in Criminal Law?
It's probably prudent to check up on what your teacher has been up to anyway. If a teacher is really irresponsible, he or she will just ask you an exam question that exactly duplicates his or her most recent law review article. Given the mandatory curve we talked about earlier, if your classmates know about your teacher's areas of current interest and you don't, they may scope out some of the exam questions in advance and your grades on the curve will be lower than theirs. My contracts teacher did that-asked a big question on secured transactions that he had just written about in an obscure law review. In those Dark Ages before there was LEXIS, I just got the article by chance.
The best way to find out what the exam is going to look like is to look at the teacher's old exams. Law professors hate writing and grading exams, so the temptation to reuse old material is almost irresistible. The odds of repeat questions or question types go up if he or she is still using the same casebook year after year. Better still are the practice exams the teacher gives you, because they reflect the teacher's absolutely most recent thinking, unless, of course, the teacher uses an old exam as a practice exam, in which case it's all the same.
TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE
Everyone I talked to participated in a study group at the end of the first and second semesters of the first year to go over possible exams. An even better way is to get the old exams and go over the questions directed at a subset of the material after you've finished studying it in class. Carol Counselor puts her head together with others when it comes to practice exams, because "three or four heads are better." Together they issue-spot, rule-state, analyze, and discuss where the law might go next. Going over the torts teacher's old exam question on negligence after finishing the section on liability and negligence, for example, gets you used to thinking in law school mode.
It's probably helpful but not critical to establish a study group during the semester and before exams. A very young and shy woman I interviewed at the end of her first year at a big D.C. school graphically described how her shyness made the pressure to find and participate in a study group very hard on her. Like many women, she needed to see what the social rules were before she took a social chance (needless to say, the experience of participating in class discussion did not fill her with feelings of unmixed delight either). But by the end of the semester even Ms. Shy had found a group. She describes her study group technique. "We would do monster study sessions and sit for ten to twelve hours and go through the entire semester [for each course) and say what we knew out loud and explain it to someone else." The bad news is that the study group is probably necessary for most people's success, but not sufficient to guarantee a good outcome. Although Shy did brilliantly, scoring in the top of her class, others in her study group did "well" but "didn't get the grades [Ms. Shy] did." However, when Shy got behind in her contracts outline, she blew off the study group in order to finish her outline before the exam and her grades really suffered.
The IRAC
Regardless of the form of the exam, its purpose is twofold: first, to allow you to show off that you know the basic rules that have evolved to govern particular issues in each area of the law; second, to allow you to show off that you've mastered the disputes that have arisen at the new places where issues in the law are still evolving. In order to do these two things, you must be able to spot the issues. So, Hirshman's 1-2-3 of examsmanship:
- Spot the issues.
- Show off that you know what the settled law looks like up to the point where it became unsettled over the particular issue.
- Show off that you know the hard arguments on all sides of the particular issue that's unsettled.
Then go for a beer (okay, Rule 4).
Whitebread tells you that the secret to this process is the IRAC: issue recognition, rule in general, applied to the point you recognized, conclusion of how it should be resolved. Here's how it works. You read over the exam question once quickly to see what the teacher is asking at the end. Then you go back over it slowly and look for the issues of law buried in it. As you spot each one, draw a circle around it.
Here's how your outline comes in handy. After you make your outline, memorize around ten of the categories of legal issues you've identified. A torts list might be:
- standard of liability,
- proof of liability
- duty
- nonphysical harm
- causation,
- defenses
- strict liability
- damages
- insurance
- alternatives.
As soon as you walk into the torts exam, write the ten or eleven categories of issues down on the inside cover of your blue book. This is your blue book list or BBL. That way you won't forget anything major. As you go through the question looking for issues, keep the categories of issues in mind.
Although you can't bring a forty-page outline into the exam unless the exam is open book, with the categories of issue in mind, the particular version of the issues buried in the question will jump out at you because they will resemble although not be identical to the issues in the cases you read and discussed in the various categories you've just written down. So as you read the exam, BBL category 1, standard of liability, should alert you to the question of whether driving with one broken wiper is negligent; standard 3, duty, will alert you to the issue of whether the driver has an elevated duty to everyone or only passengers on a common carriage; and so forth down the line.
Once you've spotted the issue, you have to remember without much more help in the exam what the rule is for the issue. In negligence, for example, a common rule is that the risk of the harm times the severity of the harm must exceed the cost of taking precautions. So when you spot the issue of negligence in the form of the broken windshield wiper, write down the rule as quickly as you can. Then you ask how the rule applies to a passenger-side wiper, and if your teacher is doing her stuff, the issue will be right at the edge of the clear application of the rule, so you must say so: How likely is it that the driver would have to see out the passenger side (after all, we don't have wipers on side windows) to avoid a big accident (probably any auto accident is big)? It wouldn't cost much to fix it, but maybe he just discovered it was broken. Then you may take a stab at asserting a conclusion about the issue-for instance, that the driver would be liable, because, after all, we have a custom of putting wipers on rear windows, so we must think collateral windows matter, or whatever. You don't have to reach a conclusion; actually, most issues in the marathon of first-year exams are actually springboards to the next level of analysis, which in this case would be that the driver might be a common carrier with a heightened duty of care. (State common carrier rule, apply it to charter bus, conclude that it does or does not apply, and spring on to next issue: Does the heightened duty apply to nonpassengers?) When you finish the question, go over your BBL to be sure you haven't forgotten anything.
A word of caution here. Just because it appears on your BBL doesn't mean it's in each question. I just told you teachers tend to break the course down into a series of exam questions covering subsets of the course material. If you write about something in the course that is completely irrelevant to the question-that Prince could afford insurance or whether he assumed the risk of being hit when he got into the car, for example-most teachers will just glide right past it and you will have wasted your time. But the BBL does exist as a check on exam panic, because it suggests the categories if your mind freezes and it ensures that nothing major will escape.
Just Memorize I lie Body of Law and Spit It Back
A substantial minority of my interviewees filed a dissenting opinion on the brief, outline, IRAC strategy. They said, "Don't think about the law; just memorize the doctrine from hornbooks and Emmanuel law outline" (Columbia). Most compellingly, UCLA invoked her mom: "My mother [a lawyer] went through exactly what needed to be done and I did really well." UCLA's mom advises, "Don't brief the cases; buy the canned briefs." This elicited some nods in the group. "We wasted so much time fishing, and it helps you not look like a fool in class." The canned briefs defi-nitely have their place. Even Carol and other semipurists "dip into Emmanuel [the most common of the commercial outlines for sale in the bookstore] around exam time."
Most professional law school strategists advise you to outline your answer for five minutes before you start issue spotting, rule reciting, applying, and concluding. UCLA's mom says not to bother-it just takes time and teachers don't care about a well- organized answer. Ms. NYU agrees. She thinks you should know what you want to say before you go into the exam and then just use the exam as an opportunity to write what you've memorized. In other words, in response to my hypothetical question about the windshield wiper, just write a one-hour treatise on the law of negligence without paying much attention to the actual question.
I regard this as a high roll, but pretty useful if it's a course you feel insecure about. If you can't understand the material well enough to distribute your learning around in an elaborate question, then memorizing and reciting is much better than freezing in the exam room. Just check the question to see what general areas of the course are reflected there (Is this a question about negligence? Is this a question about negligence and causation?) and then recite your outline or the commercial outlines on those areas.
Carol also emphasized speed: "Perfectionists in law school and on the exam have to learn to let go and cover issues however imperfectly." In other words, the teacher is looking as much for you to see there's an issue as to decide what the outcome will be-to note "It's a bus line and therefore may have a heightened obligation" than to say "In Smith v. Jones, the Ohio supreme court held that bus lines have an extra duty to their passengers, but that was a city bus, and this is a charter bus." "You need courage and confidence to be imperfect," she concluded, and that's why you mustn't bail out on the class hazing if you can possibly avoid it. Unless the atmosphere is ruinously hostile, with students hazing any woman who tries to answer and visibly sexist professors, try to keep playing the game. You need courage to be imperfect.
The UCLA group had some other easy, clever ideas: Underline key words or cases in the question and in your answer, so the teacher grading as quickly as he or she can will see you've remembered the applicable concepts; start with the last question, because you'll stand out because everyone else is out of time, and start with the shortest questions; it builds your self-esteem. White- bread's book has some invaluable suggestions for these technical aspects of exam taking.
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