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The student should reconcile himself to spending almost all of his time during the first semester of law school studying law. In addition to the necessity of understanding each assignment covered in the casebook and classroom so that every succeeding block of material is comprehensible and in perspective, there are two primary goals of studying which require different approaches. The immediate goal is to be familiar with the material to a sufficient degree so that what takes place in the classroom will be meaningful and so that the student is prepared to be a participant, whether voluntary or involuntary. The second goal is to master the material for the purposes of the semester exams, and, more generally, to make the material a permanent part of one's working knowledge of the law.
To be adequately prepared for class, the student will want to be specifically familiar with the details of the assigned materials. Without attempting to memorize bits of information, he will want to be conversant with the peculiarities of the cases, the names of the parties, and the specific considerations determinative of the resolution of the issues. It is therefore often of little value to read too far ahead in a casebook or to prepare an assignment too far before the class will meet, for in the intervening days filled with other cases and classes, the particular facts and principles contained in the assignment will begin to dim and blur. Rather, the student should plan his schedule so that he can prepare an assignment a day or two before the class in which it will be discussed. Because of the limited consequences of one's classroom performance and because the specific details of each and every case need not he retained for the exams, it is a waste of time to study intensely a block of material at this point with the hope of being able to answer any question a professor might pose in class. What the student recalls from a careful recent reading will be sufficient for performing adequately in class and for gaining the greatest value from a class.
To prepare for class, the student should first preview the assigned material, taking about five minutes to skim through the pages noting the headings, the number and length of the cases involved, and the nature of any supplemental material. It can also be of value to examine the table of contents to see just where the cases fit into the overall subject area. These few minutes devoted to gaining an overview of the assignment will be well spent, for if the student begins studying without any idea of the relation of the material to what went before and what will come after, he will probably read the bulk of an assignment before its special relevance becomes clear.
The assignment can then be attacked. Cases cannot be read in the same way as short stories. The student should not be alarmed that his reading speed declines remarkably while working through a series of cases, for learning the language of the law is almost equivalent to learning a foreign language.
Perhaps the steepest hurdle all beginning law students will first encounter is the strange new world of legal language. Lawyers and judges seem to have a "peculiar cant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand," Gulliver said of the people he met in his travels. Lawyers have ignored such Swiftian barbs for centuries, and have continued the practice of their mysterious science, inaccessible to the uninitiated.
The first-year student must fight the temptation to gloss over the new words or phrases he does not understand, for without learning their meaning and perceiving how they are used in the context of a case, the student will fall into a false sense of complacency about his understanding of an assignment. Much of his time will be spent with a law dictionary as he works his way carefully through an assignment. Justice Hugo Black decided to teach his son something about the law before he started law school. He gave him a copy of Holmes's Common Law and told him to read a section and then the two of them would discuss it.
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The first night after dinner, Justice Black took the hook from his son and asked him what part he had read. His son remembered that evening:
I showed him. Right off he said, "What is a tort?"
"I don't know."
"Hmm," he said. "What is a conversion?"
"Conversion is when you change from one thing to another."
He closed the book and threw it at me.
"Good Lord, it's worse than I thought. You're either too lazy to use the dictionary or you don't know how. You're not ready to discuss anything. Don't ever come in here again telling me you've read something when you don't even know what key words mean. Now spend the rest of the night learning the words you passed over that might as well be ink spots for all they mean to you.
In addition to the time necessary for learning a new vocabulary and a new language, the student's reading speed will also suffer as lie makes annotations in the margins and highlights pertinent sections of the cases as he proceeds. Such study aids can be a useful means of noting important points for easy retrieval in class or when reviewing the case, and, again, can help ensure that the student is reading the cases critically. The student should take care that he marks only the most relevant sections of an opinion, for it is of little value to have almost every sentence underlined; this usually indicates that the student was not reading the opinion thoughtfully.
The student should brief each case immediately after it has been read. Briefing not only provides an opportunity to study and review the case to see if it was fully understood, but also provides a written summary to refresh the student's recollection of the case during class or months later when he is studying for his exam. A standard form of briefing is as follows:
The holding of the case follows. This should be a one-sentence statement that answers the question posed by the issue. What has the court decided? What does the case stand for? If the student can isolate and extract the core issue and the core holding of a case-a skill he will acquire through repeated briefings-he can be confident that he has a sound, basic understanding of the case.
The reasoning by which the court arrived at the decision can then be summarized. On what legal, practical, theoretical, precedential, or policy grounds did the court base its opinion? The student should not attempt to recapture the full complexities of the court's reasoning, but should merely summarize each point he believes was an important basis in reaching the decision.
A complete brief of almost any case can fit on one side of a page-of paper. If a .student's briefs tend to run substantially longer, it is possible that he is merely taking notes on the case rather than wrestling with the case in a critical manner. In studying an area of law, there are great advantages to be derived from having stripped a case to its essential framework and from having isolated its meaning in one's own words.
A lawyer's mind has been compared to a bathtub filled up with legal knowledge in regard to each new problem he handles and then drained to ready it for the next case. This analogy is less accurate in relation to the law student's mind; though much of the specific information concerning cases can be drained or allowed to atrophy without consequence, at a minimum a core of principles concerning each course must be retained at least through the examination period.
After the material for a class has been read and briefed, the class has met and the material has been discussed, and the student has reviewed and clarified his briefs and class notes, he will know more about that discrete area of law than he ever will unless he chances to encounter the area again in his professional career. His study of the material, however, is not complete. The most important aspect of his study remains. It is at this time-the day the class has met or certainly within the week-that the student must distill his knowledge of the assignment to its pith and commit it to his outline of the course. It is the boiling away of the material to its essence- like boiling gallons of maple sap to produce a (mart of maple syrup-that is the heart of the intellectual process of studying law. Because the preparation of an outline is the most important single avenue to success in law school, it will be treated separately later in this section.
It should be no secret that just as in college the student found there were review notes or "trots" available for almost every conceivable work of literature, so there are prepared notes for almost every legal subject and every casebook in current use. These are called by various names: case digests, law summaries, outlines, or legal outlines. Some are published commercially by companies specializing in the outline business. They can include briefs of every case in a casebook or can be in the form of an outline of the legal subject such as the student would prepare for each of his courses. Others are prepared for sale by students of the law school and therefore are geared even more closely to a particular professor's course, sometimes even capturing for posterity the exact sentences and hypotheticals the professor uses year after year. Both commercial and student outlines will be for sale in the law school bookstore, and the commercial companies as well as the student authors usually manage to have a generous supply of advertisements posted at various strategic spots in the law school.
For a student who is having difficulty with a course, the existence of such aids will seem like an answer to all his prayers. Cautioning him against their use would be as easy as warning a shipwrecked, sun-beaten sailor not to drink salt water. Nevertheless, the dangers involved with their use must be very clearly recognized.
There is no guarantee that these outlines or summaries are accurate; the student could therefore get an incorrect picture of the law. There is no guarantee that they are complete; what an outline reports about a case, what a student might have gotten out of it by reading it himself, and what the professor draws out of it can vary dramatically. There is no guarantee that they are up-to-date; some professors take a special delight in annually altering their material to stay one jump ahead of the professional outliners.
But perhaps most dangerous of all is the ease with which these prepared materials can become a crutch which inhibits or stunts the student's legal growth. No matter what his intention in buying an outline-as a supplement to or substitute for the study of assigned materials-the temptation to depend on them exclusively can become irresistible when work is piling up, when reading assignments are getting longer, when the student feels that the law is indeed becoming a very jealous mistress.
There are some students who get to the point where they bring these outlines to class, take notes in them only to fill in an occasional gap, and don't bother their casebooks again for the rest of the semester. Some students who follow this practice come out unscathed after exams, although by dealing only with a skeleton of a subject they will have missed much of the sinew and blood that make the law a part of life itself.
But often the student who feels he needs the type of help he expects the outlines to provide will suffer the most from relying on them. If he actually attempts to use them in conjunction with his casebook and notes, he will probably discover that he is spending more time trying to see how the outline fits the material than he would in working through the material on his own. And if he becomes dependent on them, he will he bypassing the intellectual process which most people must experience to be able to learn a legal subject in anything more than a superficial sense. It can become too easy to consider the material in an outline as a body of concrete knowledge simply to be memorized, without understanding the dynamic tensions and tugs behind the material-which is what the study of law is all about. To depend on commercial outlines in lieu of reading the cases and preparing one's own outlines is to miss the heart of the learning experience of law school and to be only temporarily aware of a large body of law which properly should be a part of one's permanent equipment. It is also to run the substantial risk of finding oneself completely unable to cope with the problems on an exam, either because the exam covers material which the outline neglected, or because the student has not gained a facility for working with or thinking about a particular subject.
The first-year student would therefore be well advised to follow the ancient doctrine of caveat emptor before submitting to the siren song of a commercially packaged route to law school success.
A study group is a group of students, usually about five or six and rarely more than ten, who band together for mutual aid and support. The students, all taking the same courses from the same professors, gather at specified intervals to review the work covered in each class, to talk out problems with the classes, and to discuss exam strategies. Usually the students divide up the courses among themselves with each member of the study group becoming a specialist in one of the courses. That student has the responsibility to do any extra research needed to answer questions the other members of the group might have, and the specialist prepares the outline for that course. This outline is then duplicated and each member of the group receives a copy before the exam.
Study groups can provide a convenient forum for the discussion of the law, which can be an important part of the student's legal education and a means of gaining a working knowledge of different legal subjects. By pooling their knowledge, each student receives the benefit of a range of insights into the mechanical and substantive aspects of a course. And the use of the specialist system can cut down on the time the student must devote to each class.
But there can also be serious limitations to the study-group method of studying law. A study group will be no better than the students who comprise it. Unless the students knew each other before coming to law school, they will have little idea of the intellectual capabilities of their associates. There is therefore always the possibility that a group could exemplify the proverbial dangers of the blind leading the blind, or resemble the merchant convoys crossing the Atlantic in the days of World War II, with the convoy never able to move faster than the slowest ship. In such instances, the student might well be better off on his own. Also, there is the possibility that when it comes time to distribute the outlines, one or more of the outlines might prove to be disappointing or inadequate or one student might prove to be the type of person who simply cannot complete a project to meet a deadline. If the group has been depending on each of the outlines for exam preparation, the fortunes of the whole group could be endangered by such eventualities. Of course, this type of disaster could be avoided by distributing the outlines piecemeal throughout the semester. Even so, there are those study-group members who will find that they do superbly on the exam in the subject for which they were the specialist, but perform less well on the other exams. Here again, as with the use of prepared outlines, if the student bypasses too much of the personal intellectual process of coming to grips with each course-a process which many students find calls for the preparation of their own outlines-he may discover too late that he has not developed the ability to work with a subject to the degree called for by an examination.
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