Cracking the Case Method, Legal Analysis for Law School Success
Authors:
Bergman, Paul B. / Goodman, Patrick / Holm, Thomas
Edition:
2nd
Copyright Date:
2018
24 chapters
have results for Cracking the case method : legal analysis for law school success
Additional Praise for Cracking the Case Method 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- “Reading this book before my first year of law school gave me a much-needed primer into the world of legal education. If you are the first in your family to go to law school or have not worked in the legal profession before starting law school this book will help level the playing field by giving you guidance from award winning professors.
- “I found the transition from undergrad to law school quite difficult, but it was also a welcomed challenge.
- Cracking the Case Method
- “Legal education and the legal profession are in the midst of a profound re-structuring brought on by a revolution in technology and dramatic changes in the economy. In the midst of such change,
- Cracking the Case Method
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Preface to the First Edition 5 results
- Legal analysis is a process of distilling discrete legal issues from stories and developing arguments to support the resolution of those legal issues. This book explains this process and illustrates its features with authentic examples of appellate court cases and case briefs, annotated excerpts of actual law school classes, and law school final examinations and model answers. If you want to achieve academic success in law school, this book provides you with the tools you need to crack the Case Method.
- As you progress through law school, you may react emotionally to appellate court judges’ stories. For example, you may become angry when you read a torts case describing how a water company allowed poisonous chemicals to contaminate a town’s drinking water. You needn’t set aside your feelings and beliefs just because you are a law student. A desire to “do something” to promote justice and help people resolve legal problems may be what motivated you to go to law school in the first place. By helping you to crack the Case Method, we hope that this book both enhances your academic success in law school and helps you acquire the professional skills that translate your desire to “do something” into becoming a caring and competent lawyer.
- Virtually all law schools rely on the Case Method of instruction to teach and test legal analysis, which lawyers and academics may refer to as “thinking like a lawyer.” Yet for decades, most law professors have left it to students to work out for themselves what legal analysis consists of and how the Case Method develops analytical ability. As a result, many law students become confused and frustrated, uncertain about what they are supposed to be learning. Standing on the other side of the lectern as law professors, we believe that greater transparency about what is unique about legal analysis can alleviate much of this distress. We have written this book because we believe that if you are or will be a law student, you have a right to know how to carry out legal analysis, and how the Case Method develops your analytical skills.
- Throughout your life, you’ve heard, read and watched thousands of stories. The storytellers have included relatives, friends, journalists, novelists and screenwriters. The Case Method introduces you to another type of storyteller, appellate court judges. The stories that judges tell range in complexity from contested visions of constitutional doctrine to disputes about an individual’s right to cross a neighbor’s property. Whatever the issues, judges impose “legal meaning” on stories when they explain how they have resolved the disputes. This book describes the process of imposing legal meaning on stories and teaches you how to carry out that process when you prepare case briefs, participate in class discussions and take final examinations.
- REFACE TO THE
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Chapter 1. The Case Method and Its Myths 100 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The book’s title,
- When you start law school, you will soon discover that ordinary words (like what constitutes a “dwelling”) often have specialized meanings in the context of a legal rule or policy. And the same is true for the term “legal analysis,” the concept that is at the heart of the Case Method.
- The instructor does not provide an answer ball in the dialogue above. But the likely reason is that no such ball is available. As will be true for many of the questions that law school instructors pose, the parent’s liability in the hypothetical circumstances is uncertain. Again, law school’s first year is all about legal analysis; the discussion itself constitutes an analysis ball. The discussion has elicited (or at least has begun to elicit) arguments that might be made for and against the legal principle’s soundness and the parent’s liability.
- The debate primarily concerns , as many upper division law school courses explore topics and practice specialties that the first year curriculum neglects. Nevertheless, many law schools have made a nip here and a tuck there and cut into the hegemony of the Case Method. However, the factors below suggest that at least for the foreseeable future, the Case Method is likely to remain the focus of law schools’ first year.
- Behind these realities is a simple truth: Your law school instructors are far less interested in your knowledge of the law than they are in your demonstrating that you can
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Chapter 2. A Three-Part Strategy for Cracking the Case Method 43 results (showing 5 best matches)
- You have no doubt heard that law school reading assignments can be lengthy, and sometimes they are. Giving “equal dignity” to every word in every case might make sense if law school exams (like many of the exams you may have taken prior to law school) required you to regurgitate the contents of assigned reading materials. But they don’t; instead, law school exams require you to use the tools of legal analysis to argue the various legal meanings of hypothetical stories. Therefore, your likely rewards for “equal dignity” reading will merely include falling behind in your reading and still getting too little sleep.
- You ultimately achieve academic success by carrying out legal analysis effectively on your law school exams. The two basic learnable components to exam preparation are (1) outlining and (2) taking practice exams.
- As current and former law professors who have graded thousands of law school exams and provided individualized instruction and academic support for thousands of successful law students, we understand that the process for developing effective legal analysis skills is time-consuming, unglamorous, and repetitive. Quite simply, you don’t become good at legal analysis by reading about it. Instead, you can only improve your legal analysis skills in the same way you might improve your physical fitness: you will need dedication, repeated practice, and patience.
- So what does effective, efficient, mindful case reading involve? At the beginning, it involves understanding the answer to the question “why do we read cases?” in the first place. Hopefully, gave you a good start to answering that question. To review, you read cases to sharpen two specific legal analysis skills central to law school exams (and law practice generally): (1) identifying legal issues; and (2) developing legal arguments.
- introduced you to the Case Method. This chapter provides an overview of the book’s three-part strategy for cracking the Case Method. This strategy consists of mastering the following three skills:
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Chapter 5. Sources of Law 40 results (showing 5 best matches)
- As a result, the legal hierarchies that are so crucial to developing the ability to crack the Case Method and engage in legal analysis tend to be irrelevant in the context of law school final examinations. Instructors often set the disputes in final examination questions in hypothetical jurisdictions with clever names, such as the State of Utopia or the State of Grace. These hypothetical locales usually do not correspond to any actual state or federal jurisdiction, and instructors may tell you to “treat all relevant authorities as statutes and judicial opinions of the State of Utopia.” Such an instruction gives equal dignity to all sources of law and overrides the usual hierarchies that would affect the outcomes of actual disputes.
- The Case Method reflects both the process of legal analysis and appellate court judges’ common law power to develop rules of general application when resolving unique controversies. But where does a judge’s power to resolve controversies come from? This chapter describes the primary sources of law in the United States.
- Below the level of national and state laws, smaller jurisdictions such as cities and counties have their own charters, ordinances, regulations, and other forms of law. You do not often encounter municipal laws in law school, especially as a 1L. This is perhaps unfortunate, since municipal laws often apply to questions that you are likely to get from family members and friends early in your law school career, such as whether your parents need to obtain a building permit for a small construction project.
- The hierarchies among sources of law are obviously important to your understanding of the arguments and holdings set forth in judicial opinions. But perhaps paradoxically, they may be of little concern to you when you take law school final examinations. In a legal system that comprises more than 51 separate jurisdictions,
- is an important principle because it enhances the legal system’s stability, continuity and predictability. Nevertheless, the judicial opinions you read in law school casebooks are more likely to depart from rather than conform to . Casebook authors generally do not select opinions that do little more than to say in effect that “the existing rule is darn good, we’ll stick with it.” Thus, judges who discuss in the cases you read are likely to pay lip service to the principle, and then go on to argue the need to depart from the prior law. For example, a court may simply decide that an earlier ruling was incorrect, as the U.S. Supreme Court did in
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Title Page 4 results
Chapter 3. Legal Issues 69 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Novelists, screenwriters, playwrights and psychologists typically use stories as a gateway for exploring human behavior, relationships and emotions. Appellate court lawyers and judges use stories as a gateway to legal analysis. Legal issues are your entry into the gateway. You begin legal analysis by engaging in the process that law school instructors and students often refer to as You don’t read stories that give rise to appeals simply because they may be interesting (though they often are), for their emotional impact (though they often have one), or for the insight they provide into human nature (though they often provide it). Instead, you give legal meaning to stories by spotting the legal issues that form the framework for your arguments. Legal issues are the “talking points” of legal analysis. The Case Method is central to at least the first year of law school not only because appellate court opinions are sources of legal principles, but also because the opinions illustrate
- In actual cases, lawyers typically develop legal issues only for disputed legal elements. When you take law school exams, in response to essay questions you may benefit by identifying and quickly disposing of undisputed elements. You typically earn exam points for spotting every legal issue to which a story plausibly gives rise, regardless of an issue’s rhetorical strength. See Chapter 10.
- By illuminating in numerous contexts the distillation of legal issues from stories, the Case Method places you in the role of a practicing litigator when you take law school examinations. As you would imagine, clients in disputes are unlikely to refer to legal issues when describing to lawyers the events giving rise to their disputes. For example, careless drivers who are sued for negligence are unlikely to tell their lawyers that “Even if I was careless, I don’t believe that my carelessness was the proximate cause of the plaintiff’s injuries.” Rather, developing legal issues is a professional and creative skill that is part of a lawyer’s rhetorical toolbox.
- All legal issues focus on discrete principles of law. Thus, you certainly have to “know the law” in order to develop legal issues. For example, to provide legal meaning to the story of a killing you have to know the elements of potentially applicable legal theories such as first and second degree murder and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. But legal issues are not merely statements of abstract legal principles. Because legal analysis primarily involves the application of abstract legal principles to concrete stories, legal issues typically link principles to the portions of stories to which the principles relate.
- You will encounter a plethora of legal issues as you progress through various first year (and beyond) law school courses. Lest that seem overwhelming, take some comfort in the reality that all legal issues fall into one of only two categories: issues. Doctrinal legal issues are the framework for arguments about whether appellate courts should create new legal principles, or invalidate or modify existing principles. Application issues are the framework for arguments about how to interpret existing legal principles in the context of concrete scenarios. Below are examples of each type of legal issue.
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Chapter 6. Casebooks 41 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Some critics of the Case Method have compared appellate court opinions to cadavers. They argue that while medical students may learn anatomy by studying corpses, it makes no sense for law students to learn how to think like a lawyer by studying dead disputes. The critics’ argument may be unfair. Though the disputes that give rise to opinions may belong to the past, the opinions’ arguments belong to the future. The arguments are tools of legal analysis that you use initially in final exams, and then again after law school.
- Casebooks, the heavy equipment of the Case Method of instruction, are primarily collections of appellate court opinions.
- You generally read opinions primarily for the content of the judges’ arguments. But part of cracking the Case Method depends on familiarizing yourself with the order in which opinions address legal issues.
- For example, your constitutional law casebook is likely to include the seminal civil rights-era opinion in , 347 U.S. 483 (1954). The opinion established the principle that public school districts cannot operate a system of racially segregated schools. The lawyers for the plaintiff school children decided when to file the case and what arguments to put forth. And the lawyers furnished the U.S. Supreme Court with the studies on the harmful effects of attending racially segregated schools that the opinion cites in support of its outcome. Because he himself later became a Supreme Court Justice, your constitutional law casebook may refer to the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer, Thurgood Marshall. But it may not mention any of the other plaintiffs’ lawyers’ names, nor the names of the respondents’ lawyers, nor the names of most of the lawyers whose efforts were central to the opinions that fill your casebooks.
- Perhaps somewhat surprisingly given law schools’ focus on legal analysis, the opinions that find their way into casebooks may not even represent stellar examples of legal reasoning. Authors may include what they consider to be poorly-reasoned opinions because training you to think like a lawyer includes developing your ability to identify and respond to weak arguments. Indeed, casebook authors may select a case in which a judge’s reasoning is all but non-existent, thereby placing the burden on you to tease out relevant legal theories, disputed legal issues, arguments and holdings.
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Chapter 13. The Common Law Tradition (with Civil Law Comparisons) 125 results (showing 5 best matches)
- To paraphrase a popular form of television sponsor’s announcement, “The Case Method is made possible by the Common Law Tradition.” More explicitly, law schools can make legal analysis the focus of the first-year curriculum because the common law tradition developed an adversarial system of justice that relies on the rhetoric of lawyers and appellate court judges to create, interpret and sometimes invalidate legal rules and processes in the course of litigating concrete disputes.
- This chapter provides an overview of the common law tradition. Many of the specific legal principles and procedures that developed through common law adjudication have passed into history. But the tradition remains vibrant and is reflected in the adversary system, the roles of courts and lawyers, in current legal rights and obligations, and in law schools’ reliance on the Case Method of instruction.
- When Henry II promulgated the Assize of Clarendon, was a dispute resolution method imported by the Normans, but not welcomed particularly by the locals. Trial by battle was essentially a judicial duel. Parties engaged in hand-to-hand combat on the field of battle, often with swords. There were exceptions for those who were deemed unfit for fighting, including the very young, the very old, women and clergymen (and hopefully authors of books on the Case Method). Instead of lawyers, parties who could afford it and wanted to leave a dispute with their heads intact were often allowed to hire fighters to do the dirty deeds for them. (Are you happier now that even as expensive as they are, you get to spend your money on casebooks and outlines rather than body armor? Had you gone to law school a few centuries earlier, your law school might have used the Mace rather than the Case Method of instruction. You might have had to buy chain mail for a course in Thrust and Parry. And “Estate...
- Beyond the specific rules and procedures that the common law tradition has produced, the centrality of legal analysis to decision-making is perhaps the most important link between the tradition and the Case Method of instruction. A few opinions that judges have written centuries apart illustrate the use of legal rhetoric in the common law tradition.
- These changes have not led law schools to abandon the Case Method. Though constitutions, legislation and regulations may be increasingly significant of rules, the common law in the U.S. continues much as it always has. One reason is that judges constitutional provisions and legislation in the context of concrete events. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court is the ultimate authority when it comes to interpreting the meaning of “due process of law” or Congress’ power to “regulate interstate commerce.” And legal rhetoric is equally necessary to lawyers and judges, whether their arguments concern the meaning of constitutional provisions, legislation or judge-made law.
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Chapter 9. Outlining and Exam Preparation 101 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Acquire several exams that your professors previously gave in the same courses. If some of your professors are new, ask them if they plan to model their exams on some of their colleagues’ exams. If they do, use that professor’s exams to practice. If some professors used to teach at other schools, ask them if they will provide their prior exams from their former school. They may or may not comply. If they don’t comply, you can take a bit of solace in knowing that a published and well-respected book (aka
- While some authors and professors encourage students to start outlining as early as the first or second week of the semester, this advice may not be helpful to 1L’s for the following two reasons. First, you expand your analytical capacity with each passing week. In the first few weeks of law school, your understanding of legal analysis may be too unformed to make outlining a productive activity. As a result, any work you do on your nascent outline early in the semester will almost certainly have to be redone later.
- While the Case Method typifies law school instruction in the first year, instructors assess your rhetorical skills on final exams by using the Problem Method. Outlines are the bridge between these two methods. When you prepare outlines you “synthesize” the abstract legal principles that have emerged case by case. That is, you identify rhetorical relationships among principles, so that when you analyze problems on final exams you can identify legal issues, address them in a logical order, and demonstrate how one principle may limit or qualify another one.
- If you use a commercial study aid, select the study aid that best resonates with how you think about the material. The study aid that is “best” depends on how you learn and what you need to help you understand the material. You may prefer commercial outlines that provide an overall structure for the material without providing substantial detail. Or you may find that outlines that offer layers of minutiae are more helpful. Spend some time in your law school’s bookstore or library paging through various commercial outlines relating to your course. Find one whose organization and language best “speaks” to you.
- Your revised outline should look substantially different from the pre-existing outline that you began with. It will be unique to you, and reflect your thoughts and your approach to the material. The principal author of this chapter only prepared three outlines “from scratch” in his three years of law school. He created the rest of his outlines by working from another student’s outline. He still relied on the casebook’s table of contents and course syllabus to help him create a broad framework for the material. He then made the outline “his own” by working rigorously through the material. Having a pre-existing outline saved him some initial grunt work from not having to write out the rules from scratch and gave him suggestions for his overall structure, but otherwise the pre-existing outline was a means to an end: creating his own outline.
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About the Authors 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Patrick Goodman is a Lecturer in Law at the UCLA School of Law. In 2010, Patrick was awarded the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2013, he received the UCLA School of Law’s Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching. Patrick was elected the UCLA School of Law Professor of the Year by the graduating class for six consecutive years, from 2010 until 2015.
- Patrick is the co-creator of UCLA’s first-year Introduction to Legal Analysis course. He also teaches Remedies, Wills and Trusts, American Law in the Global Context, and a seminar in Law and Popular Culture. He has also taught Lawyering Skills, Written Legal Analysis, and a live-client appellate advocacy clinic. Patrick is part of UCLA’s Academic Support Program, which provides individualized support to students who wish to improve their law school performance.
- Tom previously served for nineteen years as director and instructor for the UCLA School of Law’s Lawyering Skills Clinical Program. As director of the Program, Tom managed all aspects of the Program, including developing and revising the curriculum, creating teaching materials, and training and evaluating new and experienced Lawyering Skills faculty regarding effective teaching and critiquing methods. In Lawyering Skills, Tom taught first-year law students practice-oriented legal analysis, legal research, legal writing, and other clinical skills. He also taught the Writing Advisor Seminar, an advanced legal writing and editing course associated with the Lawyering Skills Program. He also co-created and taught a course titled “Introduction to Legal Analysis,” a legal methods course for incoming 1L students that provided an immersive experience in the process of legal argument.
- from the University of Minnesota School of Law, where he served as Notes and Comments editor for the Law Review and received the ABA’s Edward J. Devitt Scholarship for excellence in trial advocacy. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Arthur L. Alarcon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney with Morrison & Foerster.
- Prior to law school, Patrick earned a Master of Education degree from UCLA. At Columbia Law School, Patrick was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and recipient of the 1996 Jane Marks Murphy Prize for Excellence in Clinical Advocacy. After law school, Patrick joined Morrison & Foerster in Los Angeles as a litigation associate, before becoming Deputy County Counsel for the County of Los Angeles, where he served as lead counsel in over one hundred appeals.
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Table of Contents 63 results (showing 5 best matches)
- ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR CRACKING THE CASE METHOD
- Chapter 2. A Three-Part Strategy for Cracking the Case Method
- 2. Step 2: Using Law School Class Discussions to Practice Legal Analysis
- 3. Step 3: Preparing for Law School Exams Through Outlining and Exam Practice
- 3. The Case Method and Legal Analysis
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Chapter 8. Rhetorical Class Discussions 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- All classes reflect instructors’ unique personalities and interests, and first year law school classes are no different. For example, law school instructors vary along such vectors as the amount of time they spend lecturing as opposed to asking questions, inviting students’ questions, and conducting role play exercises. And of course the proportions among activities can vary greatly from one class meeting to the next.
- Recognizing and indeed celebrating the idiosyncratic uniqueness of first-year classes, this chapter illustrates the most important and common function of law school class meetings. Consistent with the goals of the Case Method, first-year instructors generally use class meetings to develop students’ rhetorical skills. Identifying the legal issues that opinions address; analyzing the rulings on those issues (the “holdings”); surfacing and critiquing judges’ arguments in support of or in opposition to the holdings; developing arguments concerning the applications of rules to hypothetical situations; and assessing the need for or appropriateness of newly-created rules is at the heart of most law school classes.
- Instructors’ teaching styles to the side, first year law school classes typically focus on assigned readings, as you would hope and expect. Those readings consist primarily of appellate court opinions. However, instructors may also assign other materials, such as problems and excerpts from treatises and law review articles. They may delve into the historical roots of the legal concepts that the opinions discuss, relate those concepts to current events, and explain concepts and transactions that may be unfamiliar to many law students. For example, if a white collar crime case that you read in criminal law involves fraudulent real property lien transactions, an instructor may discuss the usual workings of the property lien “industry.”
- The sections below consist of annotated excerpts from actual first-year class meetings. The section heading for each excerpt highlights the legal theory and disputed legal issue on which the discussion focuses. As a group, the excerpts suggest how class meetings further the Case Method’s focus on legal analysis.
- This Criminal Law class focused on the tragically colorful 1884 English case of
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Preface to the Second Edition 8 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 5. Where appropriate, this edition includes discussions of opinions that courts have issued since the publication of the prior edition. Like law school casebooks, this book illustrates legal analysis with older and newer examples of appellate court opinions.
- We are delighted by the numerous positive responses that we received for the first edition of this book. In keeping with the trust placed in us to produce a book that furthers readers’ professional goals by helping them to succeed in law school, we highlight the following changes from the first edition.
- As in the first edition, we do not seek to invade your personal space or micro-manage your law school experience with suggestions about how to study, when to study, or where to study. This book focuses on
- 1. A new chapter provides an overview of the materials contained in the book, and provides a capsule summary of the skills essential to successful legal analysis.
- (Briefing Cases) to include additional suggestions and a second annotated case brief example.
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Chapter 11. Sample Contracts Final Exam Essay Question and Annotated Answer 7 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Thank you to UCLA Law Professor Alison Anderson for sharing the practice exam with the authors. The authors are responsible for the analysis of the sample answer, which is based on the law as it existed at the time the first edition of this book was published.
- (Relevant law: The facts are set in Maine simply to give you a real place to think about. However, you should think of the state as New Maine, a new state that has no judicial precedents yet. New Maine has adopted the UCC which applies to the sale of goods, but has no other relevant statutory law. All assigned case materials and Restatement provisions in the casebook should thus be treated as applicable persuasive authority).
- This exam answer was written by an upper-level law student and then edited by the authors, none of whom were under time pressure. You will not have time on your exams to write a similarly polished and expansive answer. While this answer serves as a model for how you should structure and organize your response to an exam question, it does not provide a realistic example of a sample 1L student answer written under difficult time constraints.
- Frederica came up from Boston and checked out the house at the end of September 2007. It was quite run down and full of junk and old furniture. She identified a couple of valuable antiques and arranged to sell them to a local dealer, but she decided to leave everything else in the house for the moment. While she was at the house she sorted through the mail that had continued to arrive since Wilensky’s death and found a mailer addressed to “Occupant”. It was from a local painting company and read as follows:
- Frederica planned to sell the house, and she thought a new paint job might help. She tried to call, but the line was either busy or didn’t answer, so she sent a note to the return address on the mailer saying “I accept your offer to paint the Victorian at 876 Seacoast Rd for $10,000. I assume financing can be arranged.” She mailed the letter on September 30, but several days later learned from a neighbor that Perfection Painters had done a terrible job on his house. Frederica immediately called the company and said that she had changed her mind and didn’t want the painting done. The office manager said, “I don’t know, we’re set to start tomorrow on your house, we’ve already looked it over and assigned a crew.” Frederica said, “Well, I’m canceling right now.”
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Chapter 12. Sample Constitutional Law Final Exam Essay Question and Annotated Answer 6 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Thank you to UCLA Law Professor Alison Anderson for sharing the practice exam with the authors. The authors are responsible for the analysis of the sample answer, which is based on the law as it existed at the time the first edition of this book was published.
- Reuter has asked you whether the U.S. Constitution offers her hope of success in litigation aimed at keeping her in her job. Write a memorandum identifying and evaluating the plausible arguments you could put forth on her behalf and the likely responses those arguments will provoke.
- This exam answer was written by an upper-level law student and then edited by the authors, none of whom were under time pressure. You will not have time on your exams to write a similarly polished and expansive answer. While this answer serves as a model for how you should structure and organize your response to an exam question, it does not provide a realistic example of a sample 1L student answer written under difficult time constraints.
- Kim Reuter is a female corrections officer employed by Multnomah County, Oregon, in the county jail. When the Sheriff of the county learned that Reuter was living in an intimate (but unmarried) relationship with a male ex-felon, he placed her on administrative leave and told her that he would begin the procedures necessary to terminate her employment. He said he was acting in accordance with a county ordinance that authorized termination of an employee in a case of “conflict of interest.” The ordinance presumed such a conflict when a corrections officer engaged in “an ongoing and continuous business, social or non-marital sexual relationship with a person who has been convicted of a felony within the past ten years.”
- This chapter consists of a constitutional law professor’s final exam question and an annotated model answer.
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Chapter 10. Final Exam Strategies 86 results (showing 5 best matches)
- IRAC is an organizational framework for developing thorough and well-reasoned arguments. IRAC is an acronym that stands for onclusion. The IRAC approach to preparing exam answers is effective because the IRAC formula condenses legal analysis into a four-step process. For example, IRAC reminds you to translate abstract principles into legal issues before launching into arguments. IRAC also helps you to keep arguments that pertain to one legal issue separate from those that relate to other legal issues. You probably can recall high school algebra and geometry teachers who emphasized that to earn full credit, you had to “show your work, not just turn in your answers.” IRAC is the law school equivalent of the same principle. Answers that fulfill the steps of IRAC “show your work” because they explain the process by which stories lead to legal conclusions.
- One of your principal final exam mantras should be, “Facts are my best friends.” Exam stories are like ore-rich hillsides; you mine the stories in order to unearth facts that lead to arguments. Often the facts you find resemble but are not identical to the facts set forth in appellate court opinions and law school classroom hypothetical problems. For example, if a criminal law case that you studied involved a defendant who burgled a garage that was attached to a residence, the defendant in the exam story might be accused of burgling an unattached garage. Your argument would focus in part on the possible legal significance of this factual variation.
- While every element that you identify becomes the basis of an issue that you must resolve in exam answers, even on law school exams disputes typically require complex analysis of no more than one or two elements of a legal theory. “Thinking like a lawyer” includes distinguishing disputed from undisputed issues. You typically can dispose of undisputed issues with no more than a sentence or two that links an issue to the circumstances indicating that the element has been established. For example, as the torts hypothetical above leaves no room for argument as to whether Jonathan was speeding, you could quickly dispose of one of the legal issues embedded in Rebecca’s negligence claim with a statement such as, “The fact that Jonathan was speeding satisfies the ‘breach of duty’ element of Rebecca’s negligence claim.” Having quickly disposed of undisputed issues, you devote the bulk of exam answers to arguments concerning the outcomes of elements that give rise to disputed legal issues.
- You typically rack up grading points for satisfactorily completing analytical tasks such as identifying the elements of legal theories and converting them to legal issues. However, instructors reserve the bulk of grading points for . Including all of the reasonable arguments that the various parties could put forward to support their desired legal outcomes is typically the key to doing well on law school final exams. As should your exam answers, this chapter devotes the bulk of its contents to the structure and content of legal arguments.
- Perhaps you are familiar with the old adage, “I’m sorry that this message is so long, but I didn’t have time to prepare a shorter one.” As the adage suggests, taking time to think through and outline answers before writing them out increases the likelihood that you will produce analytically ordered and concise answers. Moreover, outlines help you to “capture” the thoughts aroused by final exam stories, helping you to produce thorough answers that address all important theories and arguments. “Stream of consciousness” answers may have worked for you in college or graduate school. However, because law school instructors award points for analytical thoroughness, a stream of consciousness style of answer may cause you to overlook important issues and facts, and to address arguments in an analytically indefensible order.
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Chapter 7. Briefing Cases 74 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In the end, we have observed successful students who formally brief for all three years of law school. We have also observed successful students who by the end of their law school career had gradually dispensed with the formal brief method, and were relying on very informal reading notes. As long as your reading notes accomplish the three goals of briefing stated above (reading comprehension, preparation for class, and preparation for outlining and finals), you will be briefing effectively and efficiently, no matter how those notes may look to the outside world.
- “Case briefs” are an efficient and effective tool for focusing on legal reasoning. Think of preparing case briefs as a form of . You probably have developed note-taking habits as you’ve progressed through school. If so, briefing cases involves adapting these habits to the process of legal rhetoric, in which
- Case briefs are idiosyncratic documents that reflect your personal note-taking practices. Remember, these briefs are your notes,
- This will likely be the most important part of your brief because it summarizes judges’ explanations (arguments) for their holdings. To write it clearly will require you to document (1) the law that the court relies on to reach its conclusion, (2) the reasons for the rule, or stated differently, the policy outcomes the rule seems designed to accomplish or encourage, and (3) how the court is applying that law to the determinative facts. If a case includes one or more dissenting opinions, your brief might also include the dissenters’ principal arguments.
- Objectively correct statements of holdings are often impossible to arrive at. Good legal minds often differ as to the “proper” statement of a holding. As you will learn through the Case Method, using a case to support either a broad or a narrow legal proposition, depending upon a client’s desired legal outcome, is itself a component of legal analysis.
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Chapter 4. Common Argument Strategies 89 results (showing 5 best matches)
- While litigators may occasionally encounter a precedent that is “on all fours” with a current case, as a law student you are probably more likely to encounter a two-headed goat walking through a busy commercial intersection on your way home from law school. Because the Case Method focuses on rhetoric, the circumstances set forth in classroom hypotheticals and examination essay questions are rarely “on all fours” with the cases you have studied. When a potential precedent exists, you almost always have to develop arguments as to whether the features that distinguish new circumstances from the precedent case justify a different outcome.
- Precedential arguments grow out of the ancient common law principle of is rooted in a policy that judges should promote the stability, continuity and predictability of the justice system by adhering to the legal rulings of earlier courts. For example, assume that McCalla, a defendant in a criminal case, is charged with first degree burglary of a dwelling. The prosecutor claims that McCalla illegally broke into a garage attached to a residence, and contends that the attached garage constitutes a dwelling for purposes of the burglary statute. McCalla argues that the garage should not be considered a dwelling. The prosecutor makes a precedential argument, relying on an earlier decision made by a higher court in the same jurisdiction that interpreted the term dwelling in the burglary statute to include a garage attached to a residence. As the earlier case is “on all fours” with the pending one, the judge in McCalla’s case is bound by the earlier case’s interpretation of the term...
- For example, a “precedential argument” often refers to the legal principle that an appellate court opinion created. But lawyers and judges may make a linguistic argument based on an earlier case’s definition or use of a word or phrase. For example, in the California Court of Appeal case of (2009), a high school student was charged with interfering with the duties of a peace officer. The student had fled from a campus security officer who tried to arrest him for spraying paint on campus buildings. The issue was whether the campus security officer was a “peace officer” within the meaning of a state statute punishing anyone resisting or delaying a peace officer who is attempting to discharge his or her public duty. The opinion referred to a number of past court decisions not for their holdings, but for their definitions of the term “peace officer.” The opinion concluded based on the characteristics of “peace officers” that the past cases had emphasized that campus security officers...
- Finally, precedent-avoiding arguments can also urge judges to invalidate a claimed precedent. Similar to Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion in the world of physics, in the world of law virtually every legal policy has an equal and opposite counter-policy. This is true even for so fundamental a policy as . In this context, the equal-and-opposite policy allows judges to abandon The U.S. Supreme Court made exactly this argument in the case of involved the interpretation of criminal defendants’ Sixth Amendment right “to confront the witnesses against them” (the “confrontation clause”). Prior to , Supreme Court decisions had established a rule that notwithstanding the confrontation clause, the government could offer into evidence against criminal defendants hearsay statements made by witnesses who did not testify at trial, so long as the statements were trustworthy. , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Court’s prior decisions interpreting the confrontation clause were wrong....
- Consider the following examples of two-sided arguments in the famous case of the Court decided that if a confession were to be admissible in evidence against an accused, the police had to advise suspects before interrogation began that they had a right to remain silent, a right to consult with a lawyer before questioning began, and a right to have counsel present during questioning. In one two-sided argument, the majority opinion surfaced and criticized the “recurrent” counter-argument that “society’s need for interrogation outweighs the privilege.” The opinion argued that the warnings were necessary to protect the privilege against self-incrimination, and it quoted an eloquent statement by Justice Brandeis in an earlier case that “If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means … would bring terrible...
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Acknowledgments 3 results
- To Dean Jennifer Mnookin and the UCLA School of Law, thank you for supporting our collective work on the second edition of this book.
- To Benjamin Harris and Kristen Spada, thank you for contributing your negligence and property outlines, respectively. Your outlines served as the basis for the sample negligence outline, negligence flowchart, and adverse possession mind map provided in
- Paul, Patrick and Tom remain grateful to each other for making the writing of the second edition of this book as wonderful a collaboration as the first.
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Dedication Page 1 result
Advisory Board 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
Copyright Page 2 results
- The publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or other professional advice, and this publication is not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. If you require legal or other expert advice, you should seek the services of a competent attorney or other professional.
- Printed in the United States of America
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- Publication Date: November 15th, 2017
- ISBN: 9781640202016
- Subject: Academic Success
- Series: Career Guides
- Type: Academic/Prof. Development
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Description:
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 students struggle academically, not due to lack of intellectual ability but because they are suddenly immersed in a unique and seemingly opaque educational process without receiving any explanation of what they should be trying to learn, much less how to learn it. 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? What do instructors look for when grading answers to essay exams? Why can law students know “all the rules,” yet get poor grades?
Cracking the Case Method, 2d ed., provides concise and down-to-earth information 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 class meetings relate to law school exams. This book provides an in-depth examination of these critical topics:- The Case Method and its relationship to Socratic-style questioning and effective legal analysis.
- Semester-long strategies for learning how to “think like a lawyer” by getting the most out of reading opinions, attending classes, outlining, and preparing effectively for exams.
- How to read cases with a focus on legal issues, legal principles, and judges’ rationales for adopting and applying those principles.
- How to prepare case briefs and use them to prepare for class.
- The major types of legal argument, with many illustrations drawn from actual cases.
- Using class discussions as opportunities to practice legal analysis, based on annotated excerpts from actual first-year class discussions.
- Preparing for exams by outlining course materials and practicing exam-taking skills.
- An approach for analyzing exam questions and writing effective exam answers that display legal analytical skills, with illustrations drawn from actual essay exam questions and annotated answers.
This book provides indispensable information to anybody who is considering applying to law school, preparing for his or her 1L year, or who currently is in law school.
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