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Generally speaking, your fellow law students will be brighter and more highly motivated than your undergraduate classmates were. You will be less able to coast during the year while relying upon natural ability and last-minute cramming to get good grades in law school. Also, most law school courses require the application of well-understood legal principles to a new fact pattern. They do not simply require a regurgitation of memorized facts, formulas, or concepts. Your studying needs to be consistent, sustained, and well-directed in order for you to succeed in law school.
This article will help identify successful study methods, and it will also discuss how other law students fit into your study program.
Gathering the Information
The two basic rules with respect to obtaining the information you will need to pass your courses are: read your assignments and go to class. This is pretty simple, but very important. Remember that law school classes impart to students an understanding of legal principles by examining a series of cases.
In class, the professor does not give a lecture that simply reiterates the information contained in the written opinions assigned as reading. Rather, the professor takes it for granted that the students have read the assignment and are in possession of the information it contained. Class time is spent in a question-and-answer session or in a discussion regarding the case. Through these activities, students are supposed to derive an understanding of the legal principles involved and to gain experience in applying legal principles to particular facts. Thus, if you have not read the assignment, you will miss much of the benefit of the in-class discussions because you will not understand what people are talking about. The importance of being prepared for class and not falling behind cannot be overemphasized.
Briefing
During the first part of your first year, at the very least, you should outline or brief the cases assigned as reading before the class session in which they will be discussed. Read all the way through an opinion, then go back and brief it. Your brief should include:
- the facts
- the holding
- the legal rules
- the reasoning
As previously mentioned, some publishers sell commercial case notes or canned briefs for the cases contained in the most popular casebooks. While these are tempting to use because of the perceived potential time savings, we strongly recommend that you brief your own cases and eschew canned briefs. Reading the case and briefing it yourself gives you a fuller understanding of the case. Additionally, your brief will reflect your understanding of the case and not that of someone else. Moreover, creating your own brief helps to crystallize the important aspects of the case in your mind.
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Of course, briefing cases is time-consuming, and once you really get the hang of how law school classes operate, fully briefing all your cases in writing quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns. Briefing cases is valuable principally to focus your attention on aspects of the cases that are important from a legal standpoint, to make these points readily accessible for course outlining purposes, and to refresh your recollection of both the factual and legal aspects of the cases for purposes of classroom discussion. The process also helps you understand how case law is used as legal authority. You read cases in law school to learn legal rules and principles and why given factual situations give rise to particular results. You use the principles derived from this study to determine the probable results in slightly different factual situations, and to formulate arguments for one result or the other.
However, after a certain amount of practice reading and analyzing cases, you should not need to fully and formally brief each one. At some point you will be able to spot and retain the important points on your initial reading of the case. There are exceptions, though, where you should brief a case. For example, some second- and third-year courses are structured by the professor to maximize class participation by assigning cases to specific students for thorough analysis in class. When it is your turn, you will be expected to be able to expound on the assigned cases at length. Briefing the cases in this situation obviously will be helpful.
For the majority of second- and third-year courses, though, as well as first-year courses, once you understand what you are looking for in reading cases, full formal briefing is unnecessary. Careful reading before class and jotting down the case's key holding and rationale should suffice. Book briefing is a method of underlining or highlighting (sometimes with different colored markers according to a personal system) significant passages or sentences of the opinions in the casebooks. This allows students to quickly mark (and later quickly identify) the case's holding, legal rules, and other significant portions. After mastering the art of formally analyzing and briefing cases fully in writing, many students turn to book briefing as a way to save time and become more efficient.
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