Kevin Kneupper’s Blog

http://www.alldumb.com/item/25858/

“Every people in the world know well about this dangerous disease in the name of cancer.”

Awesome, illiterate term paper on cancer.

One of the other big things you’re going to have to figure what you want to do about is briefing your cases. “Briefing” is basically any process you use to summarize the information and holdings in the cases you’re reading. Because nearly every case contains a lot of superfluous information, this is one of the classic study methods in law school. You try to boil down the information that is absolutely necessary into a short page or two. Often these briefs are used entirely for the purposes of preparing for socratic questioning during class, and they are made so you can look off them and try to remember the basics of the case under fire. There are basically two methods that people have recommended: 1) a full brief of the case or 2) book briefing. A full brief can follow any of a number of formats, but they’ll usually follow some format such as: Name of Case, Summary of the Facts, Issues, Holdings, Rationale, and Analysis. There’s no real set, traditional format, but that’s the basics. Book briefing, on the other hand, is basically just scribbling shit in the margins of your book. Personally, that’s what I did.

Why could that possibly be a better study method? It comes down to time management and the question that you should be asking yourself about anything you’re doing to study: WHY am I doing it? For most people, briefing is about preparing for class. They do not want to look like morons in front of their classmates if and when the professor asks them some obscure question about the case. They therefore produce detailed, extensive notes about every possible question they could be asked, and learn the cases cold. My advice: it’s a better idea to just suck it up and look like a moron if you have to.

The reason for this is that preparing for class is not the most productive use of your time in law school. The most productive use of your time is to prepare for EXAMS. The single biggest mistake law students make is to assume these are the same thing. In virtually every class, they are not. Why? I’ll go into more detail on what the exams are going to be like in later posts - but in most cases, they have very little to do with what you talked about in class. They do not ask what the facts of the cases you read were. They do not ask who the parties were or expect you to have memorized any information on the cases you read. In most exams, you don’t even get very many points for knowing the rules of the cases. You don’t even get points for referencing cases in most classes, and if you do they usually give them to you if you say “that case where the guy let the wolf out of the cage and it ate those people.” The vast bulk of your points comes from applying the rules of the cases to NEW situations. The professor just makes up some random fact pattern that is vaguely similar to what you’ve had, and you are expected to state the rules and then apply them to a situation in which there is usually no clear answer. You have a single exam at the end of the semester that will determine your grade - and it has very little to do with what you are doing in class.

Preparing for class obviously has a focus that does not help you much on this kind of exam. All that time you spent summarizing the facts of the cases? That gets you minimal benefit - at best, it helps you recognize which cases your professor based the fact patterns on. Knowing the party names? The fact that the case came up on a summary judgment motion? The definition of “pro se”? Nope, none of those get you any points. They’re the kinds of things that your professor will want to know about if you get called on. But they will get you zero points on the thing most law students care about - their grade.

I tried lots of different methods. I tried the thing with the 5 highlighter colors – I did it for four cases, and it took forever and didn’t help me that much (though this may be useful to you if you are a visual learner). I tried briefing in a notebook for a while, and eventually quit that too. What I ultimately ended up doing was briefing entirely based on my expectation for what would happen if I was called on in class. In two classes, it was only volunteers or if you were called on only general questions – I didn’t do anything for these and basically only volunteered rarely if no one seemed to know the answer or if the professor said something I thought might be wrong. In Criminal law, two people were called on randomly – one had to summarize the case, one had to “prosecute” the person under Texas law (list all the offenses in Texas, go through elements, etc.). I did book briefing in this class – I wrote a list of all the crimes in the left hand page of the first part of the case, and a short summary on the right of the facts, issues, and ruling of the court. I then made a separate summary of the dissent on the page that started, if there was a dissenting opinion. In my fourth class, we knew when we would be called on, but had to be able to answer obscure questions on the case we read. Here, I briefed all the cases we could potentially get to on my day, and did really detailed work on everything. However, that was only for one day. I probably read each case two or three times.

A lot of people are probably thinking to themselves “But I learn better that way!” That’s probably true. Many people would learn about the cases much, much better by doing a book briefing method. In fact, I knew several people who could and did tell me the exact page things were on by the end of the year. The problem, as discussed above: THAT’S NOT WHAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE LEARNING. You are supposed to be learning skills, not facts. Ultimately, there are better tools for learning in law school than preparing for class - practice exams being the primary one.

What you’re going to have to ask yourself is whether your grades in law school are more important to you than what other students think about you. Nearly every person who goes through the first year of law school finds that many of the people who seemed the smartest, talked the most, etc. do not end up at the top of the class. Lots of them do - but a big chunk of the people who get the best grades will be people who don’t or who you’ve never heard of. The smart thing to do is to suck it up and look stupid a couple of times in class. Instead of wasting your time trying to learn the answer to every potential question your professor could ask you, you need to be spending it where it is most effective: studying things that give you points on exams, and not things that help you do well in class.