Kevin Kneupper’s Blog

So you’re starting out in law school. One of the first things you’ll have to understand is exactly how they’re trying to teach you. Most people completely botch this up. They end up studying the wrong things out of what they’re reading, mainly because they don’t understand what is going on. That means wasted time, which will make it much harder for you to do well in law school.

The case study method is how most law school classes are taught, especially first year classes. Essentially, what your textbook will consist of is a series of cases written by judges and selected by the authors of the book to teach you the basics of law in that class. Many textbooks will consist almost entirely of these cases, with only four or five brief points of commentary afterward. You read the case, your professor will ask you questions about it, and you end up learning the basic principles. Sounds simple? Wrong, of course. It’s law school. The textbooks will not tell you WHY they included the case. And that’s the single biggest time-waster for people in law school - they fail to figure out why they are reading the case in the first place, so they study the wrong things.

After you’ve read through any case, the absolute first thing you should be thinking is “Why did the authors put this here?” The answer is, they are trying to teach you some particular concept of law. This is usually answered fairly easily once you get the hang of it. Look to the chapter outlines. For example, in Civil Procedure, you might read a case that is placed under the heading “Personal Jurisdiction.” That case is, obviously, there to teach you something about personal jurisdiction. It may not be clear exactly what, but that’s your job to figure out. There is some point of law in that case which you are supposed to know. It sounds like it would be hard to miss this - but most law students, from my experience, do.

The reason why it’s so easy to waste time under the case method is that the editors do not confine the case to the point of law you’re trying to learn. They will give you enough details in terms of both facts and other points of law to let you understand the case - and for law students, that’s enough rope to hang themselves. The problem they get tied up in is studying all the other points of law that are there SOLELY to help them understand what was going on in the case. If a case is about personal jurisdiction, and it also has a paragraph on the elements of the tort of battery, you probably don’t need to go and memorize those elements. They have nothing to do with why you are reading the case. They don’t even have anything to do with civil procedure, the class you’re in. But many law students will spend a ton of time learning them anyway.

This lack of focus is also negative in that you don’t learn the rule you were supposed to. The case was put in there to teach you something. If you don’t stop, take a break, and think about what it’s supposed to be teaching you, you’re not going to learn. That case about personal jurisdiction is there to teach you a rule. Maybe it’s about the “stream of commerce” theory, and it’s there to teach you what rule to apply if you are in a certain situation where goods have moved across states. Maybe it’s just there to teach you the general principles of due process and of the minimum contacts test - if it’s at the beginning of the chapter in your book, and the case is International Shoe, that’s probably it. Maybe it’s there to “test the edges” of the theory or show you novel applications of it - if it’s about the Internet and how to apply personal jursidiction to websites, that might be it. You need to go through this process every time you read a case. Ask yourself what’s important about it. If you had to take away one rule of law, what would it be? What are the surrounding cases about? What do the endnotes seem to be talking about? If you can’t figure it out, ask the professor after class. They’ll probably just tell you, assuming you don’t do it 10 or 20 times. Always remember - even if it doesn’t seem like it, the cases are there and in that order for a reason. The book is supposed to be a lesson plan - the hard part of law school is that you’re now tasked with figuring out what you’re supposed to be learning.

So you’ve gotten through your summer, and you’re finally arriving at law school. Likely, you’ve got no clue what to really expect. Many new law students are panicking at least at some point during this period. There’s a lot to take in - you meet a ton of new people, and you’re thrust into a new kind of learning that you probably have little experience with. Your classes will probably not be like your undergraduate classes. Professors may not lecture to you, and they may even spend the entire class period simply asking you questions. It won’t seem like they’re getting at anything. You’ll also be learning using an entirely different method. You’ll be reading a bunch of different judicial opinions on whatever subject you’re learning. The cases you read will use a lot of legal lingo that you aren’t familiar with. You’ve got a couple of things you’re going to need to get done during this period - you need to get in, get adjusted, try out a variety of studying methods to see what works, and get yourself into a groove where you can work well for the rest of the semester.

There are a couple of things you should be doing:

1) Guage the atmosphere of the people around you. You may not care about it, but people can be very hostile to their classmates during law school. A lot of people liken it to returning to high school. These are likely people you’ll be practicing with for your entire professional career, so you ought to at least make some effort to get along. The main thing to keep in mind along this vein is that there will be a large chunk of your class who will be “anticompetitive.” In law school, unlike most undergraduate classes, your grades are determined in relation to each other. You are competing with each other for the top grades, usually on a strict curve. When one person succeeds, somebody else has to fail. Different schools have different curves, and a harder one means more pressure. People’s reactions to this differ. Some can deal with it. Some people flip out and decide to start working 24/7. Others destroy study materials, hide books, try to mislead people, etc. Finally, some people decide to become extremely hostile to any form of competition whatsoever.

You can’t do much about the others - if someone is flipping out, you can try to calm them down or take them out drinking or whatever. If you find someone trying to subvert other people, you just ignore them or avoid contact with them. The people who decide to crusade against competition are the ones it’s best just to keep your mouth shut around about the work you’re doing. You’ll notice after a month or so that at least a few people in your section have been branded as “gunners” (people who raise their hands to say something every class period) or “podium trolls” (people who run up to talk to the professor for 20 minutes after each class). You’ll actually see some pretty outrageous behavior in this vein - I once tallied the number of times a guy raised his hand in a class, and it came out to an average of 5 times a day, every day, in a 50 minute period. That kind of stuff exists and will legitimately start to grate on people. Don’t be the one doing it, or you’ll find a lot of your classmates actively disliking you. The problem is that there are a lot of people who will interpet ANYTHING along those lines. We had a couple of people react venemously to a girl who won one of those prisoner’s dilemma-type candy games by making a move to stop cooperating on the last turn. Smart move in the game - but the people who lost were royally pissed and remained that way for the whole semester.

My advice on this front is just to keep your head low. I came from a college with much smaller classes than my law school - the atmosphere there was that it was expected that you’d talk in class. With 10-20 people in a class, you sort of have to, and most classes were just a big, hour long discussion about the reading. In law school, people’s attitudes were different. Part of that was larger class sizes (it’s a lot more obnoxious if there are 150 people in the class to be talking every 10 minutes than if there are 10 people in the room). But part of it is also the atmosphere that people hate the know-it-all. Even if you do know the answer, it’s not a good idea to constantly be showing it, because people will resent it. I usually restricted raising my hand to situations where I was confused or thought the professor was wrong about something (which they will be - they’re human).

2) The next thing you need to be doing is testing out study methods. I’ll go into more detail on this in later posts - but you will come to law school and find that there are “accepted” standard methods of studying that differ from undergrad. Some of the common ones: outlining (making a big, roman-numeral based list of the material in each class to memorize), study groups (getting together with several people to talk or outline or whatever you do); briefing cases (writing a summary of the cases you read each day, usually according to a set format); book briefing cases (scribbling shit in the margins of the book because you don’t want to write out a full thing on the case); and practice exams (many law schools give you old exams beforehand, so you just take them or make outlines of what your answer would be).

You should try all of these at least once. Maybe one doesn’t work for you, maybe it does - but you won’t know until you try. The first couple of weeks are a great period to be doing this in because usually you haven’t gotten too far into the materials, you have a lighter work load, and you haven’t gotten set in your ways yet. You need to remember when you’re doing these that the point of any of these study methods is to HELP YOU LEARN. The point is not to do the study method as a hurdle or just something you’re supposed to do. Especially with outlining, people will treat it that way. Most people outline just because everyone says they’re supposed to. The reality is that this isn’t going to work with everyone, and you may also write your outline in a way that is totally useless to you. Experimentation is key, but part of that is that you have to remain willing to dump a study method if it’s taking too much time or preventing you from doing something you think is more useful.

3) You’ll also need to make an active effort to learn the language of the law. Buy a pocket Black’s Law Dictionary if you haven’t already. Get some notecards, and write each word you’re unfamiliar with down as you see it. Go through them and try to memorize them as you go - you don’t have to get every one, because gradually your legal vocabulary will start to increase. Some will be obscure stuff people don’t use often but you saw because you read a case from 1837. But if you get a good chunk of them down, you’ll be a lot better off. You’ll also avoid a common question from professors using the “Socratic Method” (a way of teaching in which they ask you questions without making declarative statements). Many professors will ask you what a word means in each case, ESPECIALLY in the first few days of class. The point of this is both to force you to look stuff up because you might get called on and to define words that you may need to know to understand the case.

4) Make sure that you get your assignments before class starts. Lots of people will make this mistake, because law school professors traditionally do not e-mail you or try to contact you with assignments. Instead, in most schools they just plop a notice on a bulletin board somewhere. ASSUME THAT YOU HAVE HOMEWORK FOR THE FIRST CLASS. If you haven’t found out about it, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it means that you don’t know about it. Go ask the professor’s secretary or assistant if you can’t find any notice anywhere, and they’ll give it to you.

5) Get into a study routine, but don’t go overboard. You don’t need to be working 15 hours a day to succeed in law school. You need to be working intelligently and you need to have a plan. Find a place where you can work without getting distracted. This differs for different people, but at home common distractions are roommates, television, internet, etc. At the library, some people get distracted by social conversations, the internet, etc. Find a spot in the library, or at home in your room, or at a coffee shop, or even at the undergraduate library where you are least distracted. There was a guy in our first year class who never left the library, but also was never at his computer studying. His stuff was always there in the same spot, any time day or night - but he was always wandering around, on the phone, in the restroom, etc. This is pointless - if you spend 15 hours in the library, you have not accomplished anything just because your stuff was at a desk. A 2 hour study session where he actually did something would have been more effective. Use the first few weeks to set up a schedule and location to study, and stick to it.

This is the first post in a serious on how to succeed in law school. It’s based on a lengthy document I wrote out for a friend of mine who went to law school a few years after I did, in which I outlined pretty much every thing I did to do well. For me, these methods worked, and worked well. I got the highest grade in the class in 4 of my 6 1L classes (most of which had over 100 people). As I told my friend, though, the same study methods aren’t going to work for everyone. I cut corners in a lot of places to spend time thinking about a “strategy” for taking each class. I didn’t spend time doing things that some people might need to, just because different people learn differently. For example, an auditory learner is going to need to do things differently from someone who learns mainly visually through flashcards. The point of this isn’t to tell you that there’s some set in stone method to getting good grades in law school - it’s to show you how I did it, and hopefully give you something to think about when trying to plan out how you’re going to study yourself. If there’s any bullet-point condensation of what I learned to be said, it’s to try every study method you can think of at least once, and stick with what seems to work. Make sure to set aside at least some time to think about whether what you’re doing is actually working - it’s worth that time to get rid of inefficient study habits.

Now, to the question that’s on the minds of anyone who’s thinking about going to law school and was an overachiever in college (read: pretty much all law students). What should you be doing the summer before your first year? Most people seem to be pretty excited about getting started, and they want to get any leg up that they can. You’ll also find all kinds of advice on all ends of the spectrum on this. Some people say just to sit on your ass and take a vacation. Some say don’t do anything substantive, just read some John Grisham books to get yourself in the mindset. At the other end, there are people who buy the first year textbooks and jump right into reading them.

My approach was something in the middle. I didn’t go get the casebooks, but I did read just about every “how to do well in law school” thing I could find on the Internet - forums, articles, a couple of books. I also got one substantive book from the “Examples and Explanations” series - a hand-me-down from a friend who had just completed his first year. And yeah, I read Brush With the Law, One-L, and all the other books glorifying your first year.

In retrospect, I think it’s probably a good idea to do some of this reading during the summer if you’ve got the time. The key thing to remember is: you are just not going to get some kind of benefit by trying to “learn” the law ahead of your peers. You cannot do better by going out and trying to memorize everything about Property Law. That’s not how you do well on exams in law school - the law is virtually infinite. There is no way to memorize it all - and no way to know that your first year teacher will actually teach you what you were trying to memorize. The curriculum varies greatly from school to school and class to class - what will end up separating you from the pack on a law school exam is your skill at analyzing the law and finding legal issues that need to be addressed. The things you do during the summer need to be geared around improving your performance when you get to law school - not trying to learn stuff beforehand.

So what can you do? I would definitely read everything you can in terms of “stories” about law school. Those books and Internet forums were actually useful when I got there - mainly because I had a good idea of what the heck everyone was talking about. I knew what outlines were, I knew what all the recommended study techniques were, and I knew a bunch of different things I could try. Getting into your first few days of reading is going to be shock enough - you’ll be thrust into reading legal cases that are hard to understand and are basically in a different language (it’s English, but it’s a professional “lingo” with a bunch of different terms you’re going to have to look up and memorize). If you go to law school without any idea what to expect, you’re not going to be able to jump right into things as far as studying goes.

Next, go get the Glannon Examples and Explanations book on Civil Procedure. Of all the study aids or materials I read in law school, this is the easiest to understand. You don’t need any background in the law to read it and do the problems. It’s required reading in a lot of schools anyway simply because it’s such a good book. Order it on Amazon, and read and do the questions in at least 5 or 6 of the chapters. The point is not to memorize the material. It’s to get used to studying it. With this particular book, it’s hard to go wrong even with no experience or knowledge of the law.

Also, you should read at least a few classic legal cases before going. It doesn’t really matter what they are - but you are going to feel overwhelmed your first week if you don’t. With the older cases especially, they are written in a legalese that is hard for anyone to understand, even lawyers. Go read some of those - look up every word you don’t know. I spent a ton of time the first week of law school just trying to memorize unfamiliar words - you can get at least some of this out of the way. Check out Marbury vs. Madison, read Hawkins vs. McGee (a classic contracts case that is referenced in the Paper Chase):

http://www.kentlaw.edu/classes/rwarner/remedies/contract_lawhawkins_v_mcgee.htm

Just get some basic familiarity with what it’s like to read a judicial opinion - because for the next 3 years, that will be how you’re going to learn. Law school teaches people through the “case method” - a method by which your professor doesn’t tell you anything, you are supposed to go read a bunch of judicial opinions and draw out what you need to know from them. The only problem is, about 90% of what’s in the opinions you don’t need to know. They aren’t written as a study tool, but they’re being used that way. So you need to get used to reading them and trying to figure out what they say. Most of the time they have a bunch of peripheral legal issues in them that you won’t have any experience with and won’t be taught in your class - but you have to get a basic understanding of them anyway.

Finally, read online about the different study methods people use. Outlining, highlighting, briefing cases, study groups - at least know what they are and the basics of them. Lots of people will be talking about them when you get there, and you need to know what’s up.

Don’t spend your entire summer doing this. There is a lot of truth to the idea that you shouldn’t burn yourself out beforehand. Give yourself a taste of what you’re in for, but don’t gag on it.