1000 Days to the Bar
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1000 Days to the Bar explains the relationship between the professional practice of law and the practice you need to perform each week to achieve your objectives. This unique guide is designed to empower first-year law students by presenting the components for academic success in a step-by-step format that lays out a practice-centered approach to legal studies. Book jacket.
1L of a Ride
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1L of a Ride provides a candid, comprehensive roadmap to both academic and emotional success in law school's crucial first year. Legal education continues to evolve and so does this classic work. Told in an accessible first-person voice, covered topics in this completely updated fifth edition include: pre-planning, top student fears, the first-year curriculum, the Socratic and case methods of teaching, effective class participation, the top habits of successful students, essential study techniques, legal research and writing, exam strategies, maintaining well-being, online learning, career planning, and much more. Combines comments from hundreds of law students, empirical research, and authentic samples of signature documents from the 1L experience, including exam questions, Socratic dialogue, and student case-briefs, class notes, and course outlines. For the first time, this edition includes free access to the 1L of a Ride Video Course, a collection of thirteen videos designed to reinforce the reading, often from fresh angles and with additional content. Each video is roughly ten minutes, followed by a short self-assessment quiz.
Applying Law
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Applying Law teaches students the skill of applying law to fact--the skill that determines law-school grades and effective advocacy after law school. The author explains with examples and exercises nine reasoning techniques that the justices of the United States Supreme Court primarily use. The nine reasoning techniques come from classifying arguments in every sentence from an entire year's worth of their cases. After studying this book, law students will have a tool belt full of specific reasoning techniques.
Bridging the Gap Between College and Law School
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This popular book helps students make the transition from their undergraduate experience to law school learning. Unlike other ''introduction to law school'' texts, Bridging the Gap offers a different approach because it: explains the ''why'' of law, providing students with the context necessary to understand why law school is taught in a certain manner; explains the ''how'' of the law, setting out a step-by-step process that will help students adapt to the law school setting; explains the ''what'' of the law, giving students the opportunity to practice the problem-solving process by providing numerous exercises in a variety of subject matter areas. Rather than giving only general advice, or black letter law and some practice problems for a specific subject, Bridging the Gap provides the context, the process, and the problems. Written by two former law school professors who used these techniques with thousands of students, Bridging the Gap is a guide to what really works in law school.
Coming to Law School: How to Prepare Yourself for the Next Three Years
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This book demystifies law school and the process of studying the law. The book shows how study skills such as case briefing, taking notes in class, and preparing exam outlines are interrelated and how an incoming student can practice them before coming to law school, making the transition from prospective to actual law student easier and as painless as possible. The book also contains information about many practical issues, including the law school process, how to do well in a summer job, and taking the bar exam.
Cracking the Case Method, Legal Analysis for Law School Success
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For about 150 years, law schools have relied on the Case Method to teach the skills and art of legal analysis to first-year law students. Yet many first-year students struggle academically. They do not struggle because they lack intellectual ability. Instead, they struggle because they are suddenly immersed in a unique and seemingly opaque educational process where nobody has concretely explained what they should try to learn, much less how to learn it. So these students are forced to try to understand their professors' teaching methods on their own--a difficult task for many beginning students, even those who may "get it" but cannot articulate what "it" is.So students understandably ask fundamental questions like the following. Why do reading assignments consist of appellate court opinions? Why do professors rely on the Socratic Method? Why do law school classes so often leave students with more questions than answers? Why do professors' teaching methods differ from their assessment methods and how can students bridge that gap? What do instructors look for when they grade essay exam answers? Why can law students believe they knew "all the rules," yet get poor grades?Cracking the Case Method, 3d ed., provides concise and accessible instruction on how to succeed in law school by answering these questions--and many others. Students need to know what to study and how the opinions they read and discuss in class relate to law school exams. This book provides an in-depth examination of these critical topics:The Case Method: 1) how it relates to Socratic-style questioning, and 2) how it helps develop analytical skills.Semester-long strategies for learning how to "think like a lawyer" by getting the most out of reading judicial opinions, attending classes, outlining, and preparing for exams.An analytical framework that helps students read appellate court cases to focus on legal issues, legal principles, and judges' reasons for adopting and applying those principles.Twenty examples that illustrate this analytical framework; these examples discuss essential legal principles from first-year courses and use judicial opinions often assigned in these courses.How to develop case briefs and use them to prepare for class discussions, outlining, and exams--with illustrations drawn from two sample annotated briefs.The major types of legal argument--with many illustrations drawn from actual cases.How to use class discussions to practice legal analysis, demonstrated with annotated excerpts from actual first-year class discussions.How to prepare for exams with the following learning and study tools: 1) developing traditional or visual outlines of course materials; 2) analyzing hypotheticals; 3) creating checklists and flowcharts; and 4) practicing exam-taking skills.An approach for analyzing exam questions and writing effective exam answers that display powerful analytical skills--with illustrations drawn from actual essay exam questions and annotated answers.An opportunity for students to practice all the learning, writing, and analytical skills discussed in this book to a new case in a sample torts class, including the following skills: 1) reading the case; 2) briefing the case; 3) discussing the case in class; 4) incorporating the principles from the case into an outline; and 5) answering an exam question related to the case.
Critical Reading for Success in Law School and Beyond (with Video)
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Reading cases and statutes is challenging for students and attorneys. However, everybody can learn critical reading strategies and become effective legal readers and advocates. This book identifies the reading strategies used by expert legal readers and presents the strategies in a systematic sequence. It is written in an easy to read style with lots of examples. Readers will learn: the purpose for reading cases, how to read with focus, case structure and important civil and criminal procedure terms, techniques for understanding complex text, strategies for identifying the parts of a case, how to brief a case, legal analysis skills such as analogical reasoning and case synthesis, and strategies for reading statutes. The second edition adds chapters that address reading on screens and techniques for reading bar prep materials. The second edition also has a seventeen part video series with PowerPoint slides. Each video introduces a reading strategy, provides helpful tips, includes a short student exercise, and gives students the opportunity to self-assess their proficiency.
A Daily Reader For 1Ls: Becoming a Better Law Student and Lawyer in Four Minutes a Day
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A Daily Reader for 1Ls is a year's worth of short readings (three to four minutes each) designed to help first-year law students navigate the experiences of law school, discover and apply strategies for academic success, develop a sense of professional identity, engage the idea of what it means to be join a profession and act professionally, and learn some basics about the skills lawyers use every day. A Daily Reader also contains tips for handling the routines professionals must master (such as attending receptions and managing time) as well as ideas for developing and strengthening key personal traits (such as courage, empathy, judgment, and integrity). The readings begin on July 1 before first-year classes start, and topics are introduced when they are most likely to be useful--but the reader can improvise the schedule to make it fit their personal experience. A student who completes the first-year journey accompanied by A Daily Reader should anticipate finishing the year with greater success, a deeper understanding of the legal profession, and a foundation that will propel them to becoming a better lawyer.
Expert Learning for Law Students
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The third edition of Expert Learning for Law Students is a reorganization and rethinking of this highly-regarded law school success text. It retains the core insights and lessons from prior editions while updating the materials to reflect recent insights such as mindset theory, attribution theory, chunking for use, and interleaving learning. The text includes exercises and step-by-step guides to engage readers in the process of becoming expert learners, including specific strategies for succeeding in law school.
Finding Your Voice in Law School
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Drawn from interviews with students and attorneys from leading law schools and firms, this text provides strategies for succeeding in law school and beyond. Many college graduates aren't prepared for the new challenges they will face in law school. Intense classroom discussion, mock trials and moot courts, learning the language of law, and impressing potential employers in a range of interview situations. Finding Your Voice in Law School offers a step-by-step guide to the most difficult tests you will confront as a law student, from making a speech in front of a room full of lawyers to arguing before a judge and jury. Author Molly Shadel, a former Justice Department attorney and Columbia law graduate who now teaches advocacy at the University of Virginia School of Law, also explains how to lay a strong foundation for your professional reputation. Communicating effectively--with professors, at social gatherings, with supervisors and colleagues at summer jobs, and as a leader of a student organization--can have a lasting impact on your legal career.
Get a Running Start: Your Comprehensive Guide to the First Year Curriculum
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This book offers a global overview of the first-year curriculum in a single volume. In short lessons, Get a Running Start covers all the major concepts taught in each of the courses most commonly offered in the first year of law school: criminal law, torts, civil procedure, constitutional law, property, and contracts. By reading through all the lessons for a course, first-year students will get a complete overview of each course early in the semester. As the semester goes forward, students can accelerate their learning and comprehension by reviewing individual lessons when preparing for class. As the semester comes to a close, the lessons in this book provide an invaluable framework for outlining and exam preparation. Among the many features of this book readers will find useful and attractive are: An introductory chapter offering advice on how to structure a successful preparation and study process starting with the summer before law school and running straight through exams. Insider advice from successful law students and recent graduates on class preparation, course selection, career development, and managing the stress of law school.
The Guide to Belonging in Law School
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.The Guide to Belonging in Law School, available through the West Academic study aid subscription, accomplishes two discrete goals. First, it requires readers to engage in an authentic, rigorous, mini-law school semester involving reading, studying, five Socratic classes (through the connected website), exam preparation, and exam writing. Second, the book provides a foundation for students from marginalized groups to recognize and manage both subtle and explicit barriers that can impede their progress.
Introduction to the Study and Practice of Law in a Nutshell
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Must create an account to access from off-campus. "There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is style. The other is content." Professor Fred Rodell, Yale, 1936. We can't do much about content. You'll have to know how the common law system works, how to read and brief cases, how to study and take exams, how to write and argue law and how lawsuits are tried. We can do something about style. There's advice and illustrations. You'll throw pots, working your first case, making your first argument, briefing cases, taking exams, and writing memos. This is not for the faint hearted nor is law school. Think like a lawyer. I won't be a bore. I'll tell jokes, some of which are actually funny. I'll challenge you intellectually. Where does law come from? Should judges follow precedent? What if your client wants to pave Paradise and put in a parking lot? If you love ideas you'll love this book and you'll love law school. (If you love people you'll love practice.)
The Language of Law School
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Anyone who has attended law school knows that it entails an important intellectual transformation, frequently referred to as "learning to think like a lawyer." This process, which subtly induces students to think and talk in radically new and different ways about conflicts, is largely accomplished in first-year law school classes where professors inculcate new attitudes toward spoken and written language. Elizabeth Mertz's book is the first study to truly delve into that language to reveal the complexities of how this process takes place. She concludes that the transformation law students undergo is as much a shift in how they approach language-how they talk and read and write-as in how they "think."
Law 101: What Law School's Really Like
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Law 101 gives a behind-the-scenes look at what law school's really like. The advice covers all aspects of law school, and ranges from academic advice on such topics as study techniques, classroom skills, and tips for exam success, to the best ways to participate in extracurricular activities, maintain healthy relationships outside of law school, and get a job after graduation. A companion documentary, available online, provides additional perspectives on life in law school.
The Law School Labyrinth
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Law school can be an expensive, time-consuming, and frequently exhausting experience. Students must hit the ground running.Law School Labyrinthacts as a road map to the entire law school experience; from admissions to graduation and beyond.
Law School Materials for Success
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To meet the demands of law school, it is often helpful to have the big picture before you begin – a sense of what it is you are trying to do as you prepare for classes, participate in those classes, review and prepare for exams, take exams, and then begin the cycle once again.
Law School Materials for Success is designed to give you the essentials of that process.
Law School Success in a Nutshell
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Must create an account to access from off-campus. It answers questions students have as they begin their studies. What is a tort? Hornbook? Should I join a study group? It also explains and gives examples of the best methods for studying and for taking exams. It provides questions and model answers from actual law school exams. The Nutshell also provides information about the types of legal practice that are available to you when you graduate. And it describes the opportunities that will be available to you during your second and third years of law school, such as law journals, law clinics, internships, joint degree programs, and study abroad.
Law School Survival Manual
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In the Law School Survival Manual, Nancy Rapoport and Jeff Van Niel serve as the friendly voice of experience whose wit and wisdom will guide you through law school from the application process to orientation, and from your first year to graduation - including summer jobs, clerkships, and the bar exam. This concise handbook focuses on all aspects of law school that are mystifying or tricky or both.
One L of a Year
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The purpose of "One L of a Year" is to focus on the reading, studying and testing strategies used by the most successful law students. This book is more than advice—it is a learning guide based upon empirical research and statistical correlations between law student learning and their law school GPAs.Most importantly, this book attempts to show you what high-ranking law students have done to achieve success during their first year. It's one thing to read about how to take a law school essay exam—it's quite another thing to see examples of student essays, outlines, legal memoranda, and multiple choice questions. With drive and determination, most students can get through law school. However, "One L of a Year" gives you the research-based skills to maximize your own success.
Open Book: The Inside Track to Law School
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This book explains what law professors expect from their students both in classes and exams. The authors, award-winning teachers with a wealth of classroom experience, give students an inside look at law school by explaining how, despite appearances to the contrary, classes connect to exams and exams connect to the practice of law. Open Book introduces them to the basic structure of our legal system and to the distinctive features of legal reasoning. To prepare students for exams, the book explains in clear and careful detail what exams are designed to test. It then devotes a single, clearly written chapter to each step of the process of answering exams. It also contains a wealth of material, both in the book and digitally, on preparing for exams. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Open Book comes with a free suite of 18 actual law school exams in Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law, Property and Torts, written and administered by law professors. These exams include not only questions, but: (1) annotations from the professors explaining what they were looking for; (2) model answers written by the professors themselves; and (3) actual student answers, with professor comments that explain why certain answers were stronger of weaker. As Open Book explains, there is no better way to prepare for exams than by practicing, and these unique materials will enable students to get the most out of their pre-exam practice.
Starting off Right in Law School
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Law school is different. Incoming students, confronted with an entirely new vocabulary and unfamiliar with the discipline's unique and demanding educational methods, are often disoriented. This book is designed to give these students a head start, both by introducing them to the fundamentals of the legal process and by helping them acquire the study skills necessary for success. Starting Off Right in Law School introduces new law students to the practice and study of law by following a lawsuit from its inception through the appeals process, illustrating what lawyers actually do, how they prepare, how they interact with clients and in courtrooms, how a lawsuit proceeds, and how students can effectively read and analyze cases, outline, and apply what they have learned on the exams.
Strategies for Legal Case Reading and Vocabulary Development
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Many law students feel that they are learning a new language during their first year of law school. For those students who are not native English speakers this process can be even more overwhelming. Strategies for Legal Case Reading and Vocabulary Development was written for just these students. The goal of the text is to help students develop the case reading and vocabulary strategies they will need to compete and succeed in an American law school.
Strategies Tactics First Year Law Student (Maximize Your Grades)
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Strategies and Tactics for the First Year Law Student gives you a detailed, step-by-step program for surviving the first year of law school. Note-taking--sharpening your note-taking skills will maximize your study time and improve your grades. Your law professor's personality--understanding it can be to your advantage. Study traps--what are they and how to avoid them. Memory aids--how classic memory systems work and when you should (and shouldn't) use them. The pressures of law school--effective techniques for handling the pressure from classmates, professors, and reading assignments. Taking exams--nine steps to writing exceptional exam answers. The Internet--useful search engines and websites.
A Weekly Guide to Being a Model Law Student
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This book gives law students weekly checklists explaining the skills necessary to successfully navigate their first year of law school. Each chapter provides a checklist of things to do that week, such as briefing cases, going over notes, outlining classes, or doing practice questions. When a new concept is introduced, this book clearly explains the concept and its purpose and provides examples. Instead of merely providing advice, this book lays out a detailed plan for students to follow. It also includes a bank of over 100 short, medium, and long practice questions in six first year subjects.
What Every Law Student Really Needs to Know
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With the aim of decreasing students' anxiety and increasing their chances of achieving academic success, What Every Law Student Really Needs to Know: An Introduction to the Study of Law, Third Edition features insights into how and why law school classes work the way they do, and the tools and techniques to better understand the substance of the first-year courses. It helps students enter law school with an understanding of legal concepts, the American legal system, and court structures. It provides a look ahead at the goals of a legal education and the life, duties, and responsibilities of being a lawyer.
What the L?
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Three recent graduates offer a completely candid student perspective on every aspect of law school, from classmates to bar review, and outlines to studying abroad.
Your Brain and Law School
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Based on the latest research, this entertaining, practical guide offers law students a formula for success in school, on the bar exam, and as a practicing attorney. Mastering the law, either as a law student or in practice, becomes much easier if one has a working knowledge of the brain's basic habits. Before you can learn to think like a lawyer, you have to have some idea about how the brain thinks. The first part of this book translates the technical research, explaining learning strategies that work for the brain in law school specifically, and calling out other tactics that are useless (though often popular lures for the misinformed). This book is unique in explaining the science behind the advice and will save you from pursuing tempting shortcuts that will take you in the wrong direction.
The second part explores the brain's decision-making processes and cognitive biases. These biases affect the ability to persuade, a necessary skill of the successful lawyer. The book talks about the art and science of framing, the seductive lure of the confirmation and egocentric biases, and the egocentricity of the availability bias. This book uses easily recognizable examples from both law and life to illustrate the potential of these biases to draw humans to mistaken judgments. Understanding these biases is critical to becoming a successful attorney and gaining proficiency in fashioning arguments that appeal to the sometimes quirky processing of the human brain.
This book is part of the Context and Practice Series, edited by Michael Hunter Schwartz, Professor of Law and Dean of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Bowen School of Law.
The Zen of Law School Success
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The Zen of Law School Success offers a comprehensive approach to succeeding in law school. Zen is about simplicity, balance, knowing your universe, knowing yourself, and staying focused on the path to enlightenment. Similarly, these principles should be the foundation for success in law school, and this book details how to put these principles into practice in order to maximize your ability to have a successful law school career. Like the Zen path to enlightenment, law school success is about balance (between studying and other aspects of life, as well as balancing your study time between subjects, outlining, etc.), knowing your universe (knowing not only the subject matter tested, but knowing how the questions are constructed, knowing what to look for, etc.), knowing yourself (what type of essay writer you are, what type of learner you are, what type of exam taker you are, etc.), and staying focused on your path (when to study, what to do when you are stressed out, what to do when you don¿t know a subject very well, etc.). In addition to offering a comprehensive approach to succeeding in law school, the book also offers practical advice for doing well during the classroom Socratic method, navigating the law school environment, managing law school stress, and getting a job after graduation. Moreover, the Zen of Law School Success focuses on doing well on final exams, including specific strategies and tips for both essay and multiple choice exams. The book includes many exercises and model answers that will benefit any law student.
