The Purpose and Contents of Law Students’ Course Outline

Case briefing, note taking, and reading and digesting outside material are only preliminary steps in the law school learning process. These activities—your daily assignments— are only half the job. From them you get only disorganized, often redundant or contradictory, raw materials. It is the process of outlining and outlining alone that converts this mass of information into a streamlined, usable form.

The Power of the Outline: One Source for All Your Information

What specifically can an outline do for you?

1. An outline will aid your learning skills immeasurably. We assimilate and memorize information much better when that material is found in a single, uniformly organized source. Your courses will require you to gather information from lectures, cases, and outside sources. Studying for an examination by trying to reread these disparate materials will be difficult and inefficient if you don’t consolidate those materials into a single source.
    
2. An outline forces you to find the essence of a subject of law in a way case briefing and reading textbooks or notes can’t. Why? Because writing outlines is hard work. You want to get the thing finished and get on with your studying. To do so, you’ll have to cut out the surplus. Find the kernel, the essence of the law, discard the rest, and move on.
    
3. Making an outline gives you an opportunity to see what you don’t know and to find out that what you thought you knew you actually don’t. Your case brief seems to say the rule is X, your professor seemed to say it was Y, and the law review article you read on the matter was so confusing you were left in a complete muddle. Outlining allows you to spot these areas of garbled input in plenty of time to find out the correct answer.
    
4. An outline will clarify organizational problems. Professors and textbooks are not going to give you the wrong information, but they may not present it in the order that reflects the way the law actually is. By thinking about the topics, juggling them, and rearranging them in proper order, you’ll have a much better understanding of how they relate.
    
5. Creating an outline is long-term exam studying. Without consciously trying to, your efforts at outlining will teach you the law

Your Outline’s Contents

Your “master outline,” the key document, from which you will study for your exams, is a consolidation of material from three sources:

• Your case briefs
• Your class notes
• Your notes from outside reading

The outlining process requires you to copy information from these sources into your master outline. You then set aside the notebooks containing those original materials and never refer to them again. The master outline and that alone, will contain every bit of information you will or might be responsible for on the exam.

Your outline will contain three types of information (which do not correspond to the above-mentioned three sources for that information). Your outline will be made up of:

• General principles
• Rules of law and facts
• Other considerations

Organization of Your Outline

The overall organization of the outline is what we have just discussed: (1) general principles, (2) rules of law and facts, and (3) other considerations. This is straightforward. The internal organization of the rules of law and facts section, however, presents a challenge. In general, you should add the topics and subtopics roughly in the order in which they were presented in class. The most valuable part of outlining is the process of reorganizing and consolidating the information you have learned, pulling apart the organization that professors and textbooks give you and reassembling it logically, with the rules and exceptions in their proper places.

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Case Names

Should you include case names in your outline? (And, by implication, should you memorize them for the test?) In some courses, case names are synonymous with major doctrines and rules of law. Learning them and using them on the exam will be a good shorthand way to let your professor know you recognize a parallel situation. You can save much space and time in writing your exam answer by using such case names.

In other courses, case names are less valuable. In contracts, for instance, there are a few landmark decisions standing for propositions so clearly that they are synonymous with the rule applied in them. Most cases in contracts, torts, and real property are merely illustrations of the rule. So, just because the case you read for class on the subject of manifestation of an offer was In re Dolt’s Zucchini, this does not mean that lawyers throughout the country uniformly refer to the proposition as the Dolt’s Zucchini rule.

The law in this country is only partly (and to a lesser and lesser degree every year) found solely in court cases. Many statutes now govern where only the common law (the court- determined law) once ruled. In all of your courses, you will be responsible for rules of law found in statutes.

These statutes represent the most arcane and convoluted legal writing you will ever encounter. Still, it is to your advantage to digest statutory passages that have been assigned or that are relevant to your course and to include them in your outline.

How long should your outline be? The answer is: long enough to include every bit of information that you might be tested on in your exam. Not a word more or a word less. Be sure to ask your professor exactly what’s fair game for the exam.

• All the rules of law the professor might test you on
• Factual scenarios corresponding to each of those rules
• Important case names and their holdings
• Digests of relevant statutory provisions
• The “general principles” and “other considerations” material you consider important