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.