1L of a Ride: A Well-Traveled Professor's Roadmap to Success in the First Year of Law School
Author:
McClurg, Andrew J.
Edition:
4th
Copyright Date:
2021
37 chapters
have results for 1l of a ride
Chapter 2 Pre-Trip Planning: What to Do Before You Arrive 132 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Take a vacation. Exercise. Eat well. Get in good physical shape. Enter law school rested and ready to go. One of my 3L research assistants, proofreading this section, wrote to say he had a fond memory of reading
- Buying and becoming adept at using a notebook computer may seem like ridiculously obvious advice, but with the proliferation of smart phones and tablets, the advice is actually more relevant today than when it appeared in the first edition of
- Forget style. Functionality is the key. This comment from a 1L about things she wished she knew at the beginning of law school made me smile:
- That so many study aids exist flags one of the oddest aspects of legal education. Law is the only educational discipline where students feel compelled to routinely buy external books to explain what they’re supposed to be learning from their assigned books. I surveyed a 1L class asking how many study aids the students purchased during the first year and the answers ranged from zero to twelve, with an average of four. One student said he scored more twenty study aids from a 3L in exchange for paying the 3L’s bar tab at the annual Barrister’s Ball (the law school prom), one more reason to socialize with your colleagues. My strategy in law school was to find one good study aid for each course.
- To Kill a Mockingbird
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Chapter 25 Online Learning 179 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 1L of a Ride
- Even without a crystal ball, it’s easy to predict that online learning in higher education, including in legal education, is likely to expand going forward. The forced “coronavirus experiment” has provided a perfect set of circumstances to stimulate that expansion. How will things ultimately shake out? Where will we be come time for the fifth edition of
- Having friends who are going through the same thing as you is very important to your 1L year. You need a strong support system. I online 1Ls to add their classmates on social media, set up times to meet in person at a restaurant or a bar or the law school and talk about law. I met my best friends in law school my 1L year because we were in the same section and sat near each other in every class. Since then, we have studied together, debated together, practiced moot court presentations together, etc. The number of times I did not understand a topic and a law school friend was able to explain it to me is crazy.
- But because there appears to be a reasonable chance that the virus could still be an issue during the 2021–2022 academic year, let’s end this chapter with some advice from my survey participants to any 1L who faces starting law school in an online setting. Note in advance that most of their advice echoes the advice applicable to new law students that has been given throughout this book, but some of it carries extra weight and urgency to students beginning their legal education in a remote learning world.
- I love law students, and most of them are honest, good people. But with so much riding on exam grades, would some students cheat if it was easy to do? I think so, and as one student commented, “Honestly, with these remote exams there are a ton of ways to cheat, and the only thing stopping students is the honor code and a moral compass.”
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Chapter 1 Destination Law School 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Get ready to embark on a wild ride unlike anything you’ve ever experienced, packed with thrills, chills, and probably a few spills. Being a 1L will challenge you like you’ve never been challenged. Law school and a law degree offer the potential for great rewards, but at a cost. The first year of law school will be one of hardest years of your life. Law school will profoundly alter the way you think, and view and interact with the world around you. Your 1L experience will change who you are, whether you want it to or not.
- While we can’t attach deep psychological meaning to these answers, dashed off hastily and perhaps in jest, the students’ spontaneous associations are nevertheless revealing. Their first-semester playlist reflects the rollercoaster ride of emotions inherent in being a 1L, including:
- Like being a parent, one can truly understand and appreciate the first year of law school only by experiencing it, so let’s start by looking at some reactions from those who did. On the last page of my first-semester Torts exam, I sometimes insert this bonus question: “Write the name of a song or a song lyric that best describes your feelings about the first semester of law school.” (It doesn’t count for any points, so don’t get your hopes up that law school exams are that easy.) Below are some of the responses. Lyrics are in quotation marks.
- But don’t let these answers bring you down. They were solicited at the end of a long, tough semester, seconds after the students completed a grueling three-hour exam. And even then—even in the very worst of times—many students expressed excitement, hope, optimism, and pride, as in:
- The best analogy I have for explaining how law school will both take you by surprise and forever alter you involves becoming a parent. When I was an expectant dad many years ago, friends and family told me the same kinds of things about becoming a parent. “It will change your life forever.” “It will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.” “Say good-bye to your old life.”
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Chapter 22 “Night” and Other Nontraditional Students 56 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Impressive! She was a student of mine long before I wrote the first edition of
- All 1L classes form close bonds and make deep friendships, but night students have a unique bond. It’s not that their friendships are better or deeper than friendships among day students, just different. A plausible explanation is their shared circumstance of being in survival mode the entire time in law school.
- One of the hardest parts is that the law school atmosphere makes part-time night students feel like second-class citizens. When I began law school, the financial aid person went home at five. Night students get off work at five and start getting to school around five-thirty for classes that begin at six. So if we needed to do anything with financial aid, we had to try to find a way to take off work because we were accommodated. Likewise, school clubs and organizations would meet at lunch during the day, effectively cutting all night students out of every social and support activity that existed. I was working a fifty-hour-a-week job when I began law school. I took my vacation from work so I could attend orientation week. I remember one particularly derisive day student cracking the comment to me, “Well, it must be nice to only take three classes when the rest of us have to take five.” I replied, “Yeah, and I’d trade my fifty-plus hours a week that I work full-time for your extra...
- This point had not occurred to me, but that’s why I ask students for help. It surprised me that several former students commented on the unique nature of relationships between night students and their professors. More than one student said that professors seem to go a bit “easier” on night students, as in this comment responding to a question about the pros and cons of being a part-time student:
- He went on to explain that he and his wife grew further apart until divorce resulted, and identified poor communication as the main culprit. Take heed of his closing remarks: “Part of the artistry of being an effective attorney is being a good communicator. Start now and start at home.”
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Prologue 64 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 1L of a Ride Video Course
- Note on the 1L of a Ride Video Course
- This fourth edition of
- Additionally, I once was a successful law student. In 1980, I graduated third in my class at the University of Florida College of Law, where I was a member of the law review and Order of the Coif, an honor conferred on the top 10% of graduates at select law schools. While my memories of the first year of law school are distant, some of them remain quite clear, which says a lot about the impact of the 1L adventure. I still remember my first day of law school orientation, first class, first Socratic interrogation, and first exam.
- Like all roadmaps, you’ll want to keep this one handy throughout your 1L trip. If you were taking a real one-year road trip, you wouldn’t just glance at the map before you backed out of the driveway and toss it aside. You’d review it each time you entered new territory or faced a new fork in the road.
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Chapter 12 Note-Taking 83 results (showing 5 best matches)
- These insights aren’t new. All the way back in the first edition of
- The above comments won’t always be true. A lot depends on the individual professor. Some law professors do quite a bit of straight lecturing and many use PowerPoint slides. A lot also depends on the individual course. Some courses are heavy on legal doctrine, which generally will require extensive note-taking, while some revolve around policy-based discussion, which might not require much note-taking. For 1Ls, the former will dominate. Except for Legal Research and Writing, the primary 1L courses are doctrinal courses heavily tested on the bar exam. There will be many rules to learn and remember.
- What can you safely leave out of your notes? Frequently, in Socratic case-dialoguing a turning point occurs where the dialogue shifts from fleshing out the assigned case and corresponding rules to a more generalized discussion of the issues marked by “What do you think?”-type questions. At this point, you usually can relax and enjoy the discussion without worrying about having to write much down. Most professors expect 1Ls to analyze and solve legal problems on the exam, which usually does not require extensive policy discussion. But 1L profs do use policy questions, so, again, generalizing is always risky.
- Hypo: A, a person who has martial arts training, is walking alone at night in a dangerous part of town. B comes up behind A and grabs A’s shoulders from behind. A throws an elbow and shatters B’s face. Turns out B is A’s best friend playing a practical joke. B sues for battery. A claims self-defense.
- This leads to an important decision faced by new law students: whether to handwrite class notes or type them on a computer. A new trend in legal education in this regard is a seemingly backwards one. Until the past several academic years, at least 90% of my students used computers to take notes in class. Then suddenly one fall (which could be a great title for either a romcom or disaster movie about the first year of law school: ), the majority of my new Torts students showed up carrying pens and pads instead of computers.
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Chapter 11 Case-Briefing 155 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Does this mean that all students who don’t brief their cases are destined to flunk out of law school? No. I asked students who had read an earlier edition of
- I disagree with your emphasis on case-briefing. My GPA is not stellar, but I am certainly not on academic probation and my grades are above the 2.5 required to compete for law review. I think that less time spent case-briefing and more time spent working on hypos and old exams, and also reading study aids, is time better spent. I feel that the professor will tell me what they want to see on an exam during lecture and that by case-briefing I am merely reinventing the wheel. (Ironically, I see
- I briefed all my cases in all my classes during my entire 1L (and most of my 2L) year. I know many people who relied upon “online briefs” but these were not typically the highest-ranked students. In my opinion, briefing cases during the 1L year cannot be overemphasized.—
- I briefed every single case that I read as a 1L. That is not to say that I don’t read online case briefs, or even incorporate some of the lines from those case briefs into my own. But I never read an online case brief, nor do I copy-paste an online case brief into my own or print off an online case brief. I read the case, make notes in my textbook as I gather the reasoning that I believe is relevant, THEN read the online case brief, THEN make my own case brief. It sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t take much time when you get efficient at it. While everyone is different, the three guys I study with, who pretty much followed the same process as me, all did well (top 10, 15, 25%).—
- The problem is that these benefits of case-briefing are intangible. That, combined with the time-sucking nature of preparing case briefs, leads many students to give up on case-briefing too soon. The benefits of case-briefing, though unseen, are real. But you don’t have to trust my opinion. Trust the students quoted below. I wrote to three students, each of them ranked number one in their respective class, and asked if they briefed all of their cases as a 1L. Here are their responses:
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Chapter 20 Maintaining Well-Being 89 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Previous editions of
- After watching Professor Levit explain the practice and offer her own three gratitudes in the well-being module of the
- In forming your inner circle, seek people who are optimistic about life, even if cynically so. Nattering Nabobs of Negativism, described in Chapter 4, should be avoided. A 1L shared this tale of an encounter she had with a Nattering Nabob:
- I’m convinced that even in the era of high tuition law students could shave a substantial percentage off their loan debt by living more frugally. Compare my Spartan law school existence to the lifestyle of many current debt-ridden students: they live alone without roommates, drive nice cars, eat out frequently, drink $5 cups of coffee like water, take vacations, etc.
- Make it a contest: every time a person mentions anything about law school, they have to pay a penalty of some type. I once held an end-of-the-year party at my house for my Torts students. One of the student party organizers came up with a game in which each student was issued three clothespins on arrival. If a student mentioned anything about law school, anyone who overheard the statement could take one of their clothespins. The students with the most clothespins at the end of the party received prizes.
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Chapter 26 Career Planning in a Changing Legal World 103 results (showing 5 best matches)
- My growing realization that law students know too little about the job opportunities that await them, combined with dispiriting data showing high rates of lawyer unhappiness, anxiety and depression, and substance abuse, led me to join with Professors Christine Coughlin (Wake Forest) and Nancy Levit (UMKC) to write
- You can see—and now explain to your relatives—why 1Ls rarely have an answer when asked “What kind of a lawyer do you want to be?” The legal world of a 1L is mostly limited to the “Big Five” doctrinal courses (Civil Procedure, Contracts, Criminal Law, Property, and Torts) discussed back in Chapter 5, plus Legal Writing and Research.
- Technology has already made substantial inroads into two areas that were once staples of billable hours for law firms: document review and contract management. In the old days, associates were assigned the job of reviewing documents manually. I still remember those long, boring days of being stuck in an office sifting through boxes of documents and marking them with a Bates stamp, a handheld numbering tool similar to a postage stamper. Now, machine-learning software can sort through millions of pages of documents searching for specific words, phrases, and contract provisions in a fraction of the time.
- As a starting point, below is a list of the twelve basic categories of legal jobs. devotes an entire chapter to each one. You can probably guess that not all of these job types are available to new law grads. Being a judge, for example, is nice work if you can get it, but usually requires many years of prior experience.
- Second, and more important, liking a legal subject area is only tangentially related to whether one would enjoy a career practicing in the area. What is a typical day like in the life of a lawyer engaged in that type of job? What is the work-life balance situation? What does the job offer in terms of compensation? Are there opportunities for advancement? Does the job provide a degree of autonomy, which research shows is a primary factor associated with job happiness? Are there even jobs available in the area?
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Index 102 results (showing 5 best matches)
Title Page 3 results
1L of a Ride 2 results
Chapter 16 Law School Essay Exams: Fifteen Common Mistakes 138 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Most first-year law school exams consist of essay questions or a combination of essay and multiple-choice questions. This chapter focuses on essay questions, while the next chapter addresses multiple-choice questions. These chapters are a perfect example of why you need to consider
- Let’s go back to the practice question for an illustration. Contrary to the popular understanding of the word, the tort of “assault” occurs when a person acts intending to create in another an of a harmful or offensive bodily contact. No actual bodily contact is required. If a contact does occur, it’s a battery.
- Some students misconstrue the IRAC methodology as an inflexible formula, which it most definitely is not. Some even go so far as to set their answers up in the form of an outline with headings like “ : . . .,” etc. Don’t do that! I inserted those words above only as a guide. An answer to an essay question should read like, well, an essay. IRAC is simply a structural way of thinking about legal analysis in a problem-solving context. It has no application to some types of essay questions, such as policy questions.
- An example from the practice question will bolster the point. As discussed above, tort law recognizes as a defense to a battery claim a legal privilege to use reasonable force to protect other people. The privilege is known as “defense of others.” “Defense of others” is a term of art. It’s the legal name attached to the privilege.
- Here’s a way to test yourself on this point. Look at your discussion of a particular issue. Visually cut it out with an imaginary pair of scissors. (Avoid real scissors. Hide all sharp objects during periods of exam stress.) The excised excerpt should be able to stand alone as a complete and coherent discussion of that issue without having to refer to other portions of your answer. If it doesn’t, you may be dancing to the Monster [Issue] Mash.
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Chapter 27 Recapping Law School’s First Year in the Words of Students 138 results (showing 5 best matches)
- When you reach the end of your 1L ride, I hope you won’t find yourself in the position of the student quoted above, bemoaning his unwillingness or inability to heed advice. I’d rather picture you smiling and thinking, “You know, that book I read about the first year gave some really good advice. I’m glad I followed it!”
- One of the frustrating aspects about giving advice on how to succeed in law school is the certain knowledge that many students won’t follow it. This is true no matter how great the advice. As we near the end of our figurative 1L ride, I thought the best way to reinforce the advice for law school success and well-being that you’ve been reading would be to hear it retold in the words of those who labored through the real 1L odyssey. Borrowing from humorist Dave Barry, I’m hoping that reading the same advice coming from law students will assure you that “I am not making this up” and help drive home key points.
- I watch as some peers travel to see significant others on the weekends or pine away about someone who is away from them. I think this is a waste of time. I would probably not enter law school and hope that a long distance relationship would work out. I think I would probably just agree to go separate ways. Time is too valuable as a 1L to deal with relationship drama, especially long-distance relationship drama.
- Two weeks before the end of the second semester, I posed the above question to a first-year class. Silly me. I naively expected cheerful answers, not taking into account the fact that with five exams still looming, the students weren’t thinking—like I was—that they were at “the end” of the first year. Their answers disproportionately centered on anxiety and exhaustion. I’m sure if I asked the same question after exams, the answers would have been a lot more upbeat. Some students, however, were able to look ahead and feel excitement, relief, and a sense of accomplishment for what they’d been through. Overall, the answers reflected the entire spectrum of emotions inherent in being a 1L. Below I included one representative answer for each emotion.
- 1L nearing completion of the first year
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- Your experience is likely to be similar. For most readers, the first year of law school may still be an abstraction. I hope I succeeded in giving it shape in these pages, but when all is said and done, what I said at the beginning of the book is true. The only way to truly understand and appreciate the 1L experience is to live it. Good luck on your journey. Here’s to a smooth ride!
- I still remember the day of my last exam of my 1L year. What a feeling! It was like being released from prison. I walked out of the law school into bright sunshine and felt light as air. That night some of my non-law school friends staged a big party at a subterranean den called and painted to resemble Middle Earth, located beneath a block of dorms on the University of Florida campus. (Tolkien was popular on college campuses long before the
- But human nature is funny that way. While I definitely would not want to repeat the first year, like many lawyers, I look back at it with nostalgia and fondness. For better or worse, there has never been another year of my life resembling my 1L experience. I’ve never learned as much or experienced as much camaraderie in any one year. There was a lot of stress too, but, fortunately, the human psyche seems designed to remember the good over the bad.
- I was the only law student there. I doubt I mentioned law school the entire night, having learned months earlier that non-law students could care less about it. I did think about it though. I have a distinct memory of sitting in a chair watching the hubbub around me, sipping punch, and feeling blissfully happy, thinking: “I’m done! I can’t believe I’m actually done!” Temporarily forgetting, I guess, that I still had two more years to go.
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Chapter 9 Law Professors 102 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 1L of a Ride
- New law students share a similar fascination about their professors. In part because the 1L universe is so small, your first-year professors will become the center of it, at least early on. While it diminishes fairly quickly, at the beginning, law students often view their professors with something approaching veneration. At a social gathering during orientation many years ago, I was standing in the restroom at a urinal when a young man next to me exclaimed, “I can’t believe it! I’m peeing next to Professor McClurg.” I’m pretty sure he was serious.
- Terrence had impressed me more than once as being not only a good student but a good person. He received good grades and was a member of the law review. Most important, way back as a 1L, he demonstrated his integrity and good heart when he approached me after Torts class more than once, troubled by legal doctrines that led to unjust results. I offered to help Terrence draft an explanation of the incident to submit with his bar application. I thought that, framed properly, the incident could be explained. It worked. His bar application sailed through without any questions asked. Would I do the same thing for every student? No. I did it for Terrence because I believed in him.
- Law school hiring practices strongly favor candidates who earned their Juris Doctor degree from a small number of highly ranked law schools. Studies of entry-level tenure-track law professor hiring over a nine-year period showed that two-thirds of the hires received their J.D. degree from a group of only fifteen law schools, with one-half of them graduating from just six law schools.
- Lawhaha.com, my legal humor blog, collects, among other items, funny memories of law school. One category is “Those lovable, quirky law professors,” which includes tales about a bald, white professor who raps in class, a professor who acts like nothing unusual has occurred when a tooth flies out of his mouth and bounces off a table during a lecture, a professor who begins class teaching the wrong course from the wrong book, a professor who runs into a door and teaches an entire class with blood streaming down his face, and a distinguished professor who stalks the classroom for an entire hour with toilet paper hanging out the back of his pants.
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Chapter 19 The Bleak Side of Law School 65 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Beyond One L: Stories About Finding Meaning and Making a Difference in Law 25
- Just months before I started law school in 1978, a new book came out: Scott Turow’s tells the story of Turow’s experience as a first-year law student at Harvard Law School. The book scared the heck out of me at the time. I didn’t remember why until I recently reread it and realized that a dominant theme of the book was negative affect. I counted specific references to: anxiety, fear, stress, panic, vulnerability, self-doubt, shame and grief, wounded self-esteem, unhappiness, paranoia, embarrassment, oppression, and insanity. Turow’s 1L story turned out to be my 1L story and the story of many law students since.
- Each year, I talk to my 1Ls about psychological distress, confessing that I suffered from it as a 1L to the point where I almost quit law school. Each time, students contact me afterwards to say that simply having someone acknowledge the issue made them feel less alone. That’s a good thing, but it’s not enough.
- That a highly competitive, demanding professional degree program like law school would cause stress is no big surprise, but the issues are much larger than that. Law students suffer disproportionately higher rates of anxiety and depression than
- While research shows that law student psychological dysfunction continues into the third year and even past graduation, the most intense whirly rides of anxiety and emotion occur in the first year, especially the first semester, when there is so much uncertainty. After that, things settle down and life falls into a more or less normal pattern. Stressors undergo a fundamental reordering. Panic over the Socratic method and exams is replaced by external worries about finding a job and paying back student loans. These external pressures are significant, but in terms of day-to-day law school, many 3Ls do in fact seem more bored than afraid.
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Chapter 21 Welcome BACK to the Jungle: The Perilous Second Semester 81 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Don’t over-worry if you can’t land a paying summer legal job after your 1L year. For one thing, you don’t have a great deal of control over the situation, especially in a tight job market. Also, many law firms simply don’t hire students after their first year because they haven’t learned enough yet to be of value.
- The realization that law school is going to be a long haul is worsened by the fact that much of the excitement and adrenaline that fuels students through the first semester evaporates. Students arrive at law school brimming with anticipation and energy. Seeing and feeling it is one of the great pleasures of being a 1L law teacher. But like romances that lose their dizzying effects once the newness wears off, law school can seem like more of a chore than an adventure after the ebullience of the first semester subsides.
- A major cause of second-semester stress at many schools is an increased workload. Some schools add an extra course in the second semester. Professors may move at a quicker pace, which means longer reading assignments and more rules to memorize. Some students voluntarily take on too many extra activities, such as participating in student organizations, which I cautioned against doing as a 1L back in Chapter 6.
- Certainly, there are several benefits to obtaining a summer legal job after your 1L year. Three big ones are experience, income, and getting exposure to firms that may make you a permanent offer in the future. While not an ironclad rule, many firms hire permanent associates from the ranks of their summer associates who performed well. Regarding income, big law firms pay summer associates handsomely, but those jobs are limited in number and generally reserved for top-performing students. Small firms pay less but are a good way to get some experience and your foot in the door.
- And then there’s the appellate brief and oral argument, one of the heaviest burdens of 1L existence. As discussed in Chapter 18, most students’ second semester load in Legal Research and Writing will include having to write an appellate brief and engage in an oral argument before a mock appellate court. No reason to rehash the subject, except to note that these requirements add substantially to second-semester workloads. It takes more time and effort to research and write an appellate brief than to compose the law office memoranda assigned in the first semester. Additionally, the oral arguments consume tremendous prep time and emotional energy. Some schools make it into a competition, adding to the pressure and workload.
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Chapter 3 Fear Factor: Top Five Law Student Worries 40 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Don’t get me wrong. A lot of the material is difficult and not all students grasp the law equally well. Some legal topics (the law of “future interests” in Property comes to mind as a quintessential 1L example) do approach utter incomprehensibility, but even those riddles can be unraveled by most students if they put in the necessary effort.
- If you’re stressed out about starting law school, take comfort in the fact that you have lots of company. Every 1L you meet, whether they show it or not, will be feeling the same way. Two weeks into the first semester, I asked a group of students to name their “biggest surprise” about law school. One student wrote: “My biggest surprise is that everyone feels the same way that I do. My insecurities are shared among most of my 152 peers. That provides tremendous comfort in that I am not the only one feeling overwhelmed, scared, stressed, and excited all at once.”
- We’ll talk more about the sources of 1L stress, including tips for reducing and managing it. In the meantime, if you find yourself feeling alone in your fears and doubts, take solace from one of my favorite quotations, by motivational educator Stan Dale:
- And upon demurrer by the plaintiff, judgment was given for him; for though it were agreed, that if men tilt or turney in the presence of the King, or if two masters of defence playing their prizes kill one another, that this shall be no felony; or if a lunatick kill a man, or the like, because felony must be done animo felonico; yet in trespass, which tends only to give damages according to hurt or loss, it is not so; and therefore if a lunatick hurt a man, he shall be answerable in trespass; and therefore no man shall be excused of a trespass (for this is in the nature of an excuse, and not of a justification, prout ei bene licuit), except it may be judged utterly without his fault.
- I was terrified of being called on—not of the act itself, but of the all-consuming silence that would follow the calling of my name, as eighty other people waited to see if I would sink or swim. Having a multitude of witnesses to a potential humiliation was a very unpleasant thought. Yet though my hands shook the first time I heard stentorian tones say “Ms. _______,” and I felt sick with nervous apprehension with every question the professor posed—one after another after another—when he turned to someone else, I felt as if I had passed some test.
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Chapter 5 The First-Year Curriculum: What to Expect 81 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Here’s a list of the courses I took as a 1L in 1978:
- Here’s a list of the courses you are likely to take as a 1L:
- The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which are the focus of most 1L courses on the subject, govern lawsuits in the federal courts. Each state has its own set of civil procedure rules to govern civil lawsuits in their respective court systems, but those rules track the federal rules for the most part. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure contain eighty-six rules, but you will closely study only a small number of them.
- Your first assignments in Property may cover cases going back to the 1800s. Unlike the law of most other subjects, which has evolved over time, many of the rules governing property rights were frozen in place centuries ago. Thus, historical context is more important to understanding Property than some other 1L courses.
- But it might be taught in a different fashion. In Chapter 9, I discuss the difference between professors who teach from a primarily practical perspective and those who teach from a primarily theoretical perspective. These divergent approaches can occur in any course, but Criminal Law is a prime candidate for theoretical teaching among 1L courses. Instead of focusing on all the detailed rules and elements, your Criminal Law professor might choose to concentrate (as mine did) on big-picture policy issues, such as the societal policies and theories underlying criminal punishment and sentencing. The difference in these teaching approaches is like night and day for students.
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Chapter 24 Law Review, Moot Court, and Other Extracurricular Activities 42 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In this chapter, we’ll review the most important and common co- and extracurricular activities. Before proceeding, however, remember my warning way back in Chapter 6 about the dangers of overcommitting to extra activities
- Many students also tout the networking benefits of participating in student organizations, which can be important in a tough job climate. As this 1L explained:
- (As you know from Chapter 6, she and I differ on the issue of 1L involvement, but I want to give you the benefit of both sides.)
- Write-on competition details vary, but they typically include a time-limited writing assignment over a period of days, such as an analysis of a recent case, accompanied by a test on citation style. One drawback of write-on competitions is their timing. They generally begin shortly after the completion of first-year exams, deterring many qualified, but exhausted students from participating in or completing the competition.
- Particularly ambitious and well-qualified students go on to become law review editors (rather than just staff members), which is considered an especially high honor. The editor-in-chief of the law review occupies a law school status equivalent to being the captain of a starship. Each year the current board of editors selects, through an application process, the editors for the next year.
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Chapter 15 Exam Preparation 40 results (showing 5 best matches)
- One benefit of being a 1L is that law schools intentionally schedule first-year exams with at least one free day between exams. In your second and third years, you might have exams on consecutive days.
- failure.” Drug rehab gone bad? Nah. Just another 1L freaking out the night before his first exam, in this case, Scott Turow, writing in his classic book,
- If you’re in a study group, reviewing practice or old exams can be one of the most productive group study activities. A group of students are more likely to spot all the issues on a question than any individual student. Reviewing exams with a group can help you learn from your oversights. If others identify an issue you missed, ask what facts in the question flagged the issue for them.
- Studies show that sleep-deprived students perform substantially worse on tests. “Pulling an all-nighter” is not only ineffective, it impairs performance. Lack of sleep negatively affects attention, concentration, and memory. Cramming is a particularly bad strategy for law school success because of the huge amount of material.
- Students spend tons of time memorizing the law and too little time learning and practicing the of law school exam-taking. Many students know all the law there is to know, but still don’t excel on exams because they never learned how to take a law school exam. The best way to get a handle on that process is by working through practice exams.
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Chapter 4 What Kind of Student Do You Want to Be? Twenty Law Student Types 59 results (showing 5 best matches)
- As for the Judger, who may also qualify as a Know-It-All, it is presumptuous in the extreme for any 1L student to believe he is qualified to evaluate the knowledge and analytical abilities of his classmates. It probably goes without saying that overt Evaluators/Judgers are not well-liked by their classmates.
- These two closely related types are sometimes the same person, but not always. Both spend a disproportionate amount of time sizing up the competition, the Evaluator by keeping close tabs on everyone’s progress and the Judger by overtly rating his classmates as smart or not smart, often based on their classroom comments. Evaluators are obsessed with knowing everyone’s grades and comparing them to their own. At one school, in the days when grades were still publicly posted on the “wailing wall” or “wall of shame” (as students called it), we had to change the entire anonymous grade-number system because an Evaluator took the time to collect and chart the grades of every 1L by exam number.
- No great shock, members of this group usually do well in law school. If you’re already a law student and find yourself getting called on disproportionately for no apparent reason, maybe you’ve been identified by the prof as a Mr./Ms. Reliable. Of course, you might also have been identified as a Slacker whom the professor wants to make an example of, so don’t start patting yourself on the back until you’ve figured it out. Because of their generally quiet demeanor, more Mr./Ms. Reliables exist than are identified by the professors, which is yet another good reason to contribute voluntarily in class. You want the professor to know if you’re a Mr./Ms. Reliable.
- You begin forming your professional identify on Day 1 of law school. How you carry yourself, speak to others, prepare for class, arrive on time is vastly important from the moment you get there. You are surrounded by a large group of future lawyers—future lawyers you might work someday, or future judges you might argue in front of someday. Every single day of law school is an opportunity to build the reputation you want to be known for—a credible, honest, kind, on-time, prepared, hardworking professional.
- The Socratic method of law teaching involves a lot of question-asking by the professors, including many “What do you think?”-type questions. Most first-year law school class sections include a small number of students who are willing to volunteer answers and comments more frequently than the other students. And to them I say: Thank you! From a professor’s perspective, a Frequent Participator beats the heck out of the student who sits silently through the course, never engaging. The most interesting, exciting, and memorable parts of law school classes always involve class discussion.
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Chapter 6 The First Days: Starting Out Right 105 results (showing 5 best matches)
- You want to get off on the right foot in these first days. Missteps can result in embarrassment, risk branding you in a negative light, facilitate your falling behind, and, in general, create extra stress that can interfere with learning. The advice in this chapter is designed to help you come out of the blocks smoothly and cleanly as you begin the 1L race.
- Having said all that, I don’t necessarily disagree with your assertion at all. I was not involved in anything outside of school my first semester, and I only really jumped into stuff with PALS [Public Action Law Society] after knowing I was on solid footing grades-wise first semester. I don’t think I ever realized as a 1L how much my grades mattered (as crazy as it is, my employer for the future only ever saw my 1L grades). . . . Employers don’t care nearly as much about your “outside involvement,” and the best way to distinguish yourself in my experience is to be as competent as possible and as high in your class as possible.
- I would have to say that I agree with your theory of not getting too involved during your 1L year. My first semester I would attend lunchtime meetings for different organizations to determine where I would like to get involved in the future, but that was pretty much the extent of my involvement in anything. The rest of my time was dedicated to studying and preparing for class every single day.
- From day one, make a habit of ensuring that all of your computer work is backed up daily, including your case briefs, class notes, outlines, and drafts of assignments for your legal research and writing courses. This rule is so basic, yet I hear sad stories about students losing some or all of their computer materials for various reasons. As I was in the final stages of editing this fourth edition, the following post from a 1L popped up on Facebook: “Thanks for deleting my Property outline MS Word! I only needed it for my exam on Monday! I don’t know how or why it disappeared. It just did, and I can’t access the recovery file.”
- I do not think 1Ls should get involved in student organizations. . . . I did not become involved in student organizations and focused on preparing for classes, periodically reviewing notes, and outlining. When I wasn’t working on school stuff, I spent my time relaxing with family and friends. I think this was one of the best decisions I made throughout law school. It allowed me to start out OCIs [On-Campus Interviews] with a high rank, which resulted in summer clerkship offers that eventually turned into permanent job offers. This was all from only my first-year grades. Those 1L grades literally defined my career path.
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Chapter 13 Outlining 82 results (showing 5 best matches)
- One week into a fall semester, a 1L came to my office and said, “Professor, everyone kept telling me I’ll be working day and night in law school, but this Saturday I was sitting there looking for something else to do. Am I missing something?” I told her to enjoy it while she could because the pace would start quickening soon.
- Outlining is not exactly a, um, thrill ride, as one of my research assistants explains below. She came up with a plan to make it more palatable to spend an entire weekend day doing it:
- I just want to emphasize how boring I find outlining to be. You basically are copying your notes, but you can’t just passively copy and paste and call it a day. When you see “???” in your notes, you may have to stop and consult multiple sources to figure out why you were confused and resolve it. So I looked for ways to make it less bleak. As a 1L, I would devote an entire day to outlining every few weeks. I would wake up early, outline, stop for a good lunch, then come back, drink coffee, and outline again until dinner. I would have a good dinner and continue working, if need be. The meals gave me a nice break and something to look forward to. I also included jokes professors made in teaching the material I was outlining or funny things about the facts of a case. Some of the jokes were cheesy, but they made me smile after a few hours behind a computer screen, so I left them in.
- 1L’s lament about what he would do differently if starting over
- 11-year-old girl’s thumb cut off while riding behind snowmobile.
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Chapter 18 Legal Research and Writing: An Interview with Five Experts 156 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The single most iterated 1L gripe—and that’s saying a lot—is that the workload required for legal writing is disproportionately heavy compared to the credit hours allocated. Usually, the workload for a law school course corresponds to the number of credit hours for the course. But students would argue we reversed everything for legal writing, requiring more work for fewer credit hours. Students complain that this allocation is completely arbitrary, but they’re wrong. It’s all done according to a highly scientific, mathematical formula:
- You heard it here first. Legal Research and Writing will consume you. Legal Research and Writing is known as a “skills course.” Your other 1L courses are all likely to be “doctrinal courses.” While first-year doctrinal courses differ in content, they are extremely similar in format. Each will involve similar daily reading assignments of judicial opinions from a casebook, some mix of Socratic Q & A and lecture about those cases in class, and the same single-exam evaluation method at the end of the semester. Whether it’s Civil Procedure, Contracts, Criminal Law, Property, or Torts, the quest for first-year success will follow a similar path and require similar tools and strategies. Thus, nearly all of the advice in this book applies equally to each of the doctrinal courses in the first-year curriculum.
- 1L’s “biggest surprise” about law school
- A response that is fraught with errors, typographical errors, and formatting errors. Typically, there is a correlation between a lack of precision in analysis and a lack of precision in style. Errors with these “finer points” distract a reader from the analysis and limit the amount of confidence a reader has in the writer’s prediction of the outcome.
- The second hallmark of an outstanding memo is its organization. The large-scale organization of an outstanding memo will be perfect from beginning to end: from the memo heading, to the framing of the legal questions presented, to the brief answers to those questions, to the statement of the facts, to the discussion, and finally to the conclusion. The mid-scale organization of an outstanding memo also will be near perfect. For example, the discussion section will be organized into appropriate subsections, each one starting with a conclusion, followed by explanation of the law, application of the law to the facts, and ending with a mini-conclusion. Finally, the small-scale organization of an outstanding memo will be excellent, with nearly every sentence and idea leading to the next idea in a logical manner, like climbing a staircase step by step to reach the logical conclusion on the landing at the top of the stairs.
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Chapter 7 The Socratic and Case Methods 98 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The difference in the way 1Ls think about legal problems at the beginning and end of the first year is dramatic. Even the Socratic-haters would be hard-pressed to deny that they really did arrive at law school with “skulls full of mush,” yet exited the Socratic arena as facile thinkers and astute legal problem-solvers. Look at this comment from a 1L two weeks away from finishing his first year:
- Trust me. While surviving the entirety of the first year is difficult, surviving the Socratic method is not. I’ve taught at several law schools and am acquainted with many law professors. I do not know a single professor who uses the Socratic method to bully or break down students. My experience is consistent with Professor Paul Brest’s that “[t]he terrorist version of the Socratic method has almost disappeared.” Asked in a survey to name the biggest surprise about law school, a 1L wrote: “What is the big deal about the Socratic method? It is written about like it’s some kind of torture. I have yet to see anyone really crucified.”
- Professors don’t do this to embarrass students or because they’re too lazy to answer questions. Remember, a goal of the Socratic method is to force students to learn by doing. So, for example, if we were discussing the defense to negligence known as “implied assumption of risk” and a student asked me to clarify a point of law involving the defense, I’d happily do it. But if the student asked, “Would it be implied assumption of risk for a person to accept a ride from a drunk driver?”, I’d say “What do you think?” because I would want the student to try to reason through the puzzle by applying the rules we learned.
- The Socratic method strikes fear in the hearts and minds of 1Ls. FACT.
- A shoots at B, but misses and hits C, who loses control of her car and crashes into D, driving a school bus full of children—H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O and P—down a winding mountain road. The school bus careens into a gas pump at the same instant lightning hits the pump. In the explosion, E, a piece of glass, hits F, walking his dog, G, nearby. G gets loose and bites Q, a law student, carrying an armload of casebooks up a staircase. The books fall on R, causing head injuries. R is rushed to the ER by EMTs, gets CPR from an RN and an IV from an MD, but it’s too late. He’s DOA. Who wins? [Three second pause.] Quick, quick, Mr. Smith! We don’t have all day.
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Chapter 23 Law School and Outside Relationships 82 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Think I’m exaggerating? Check out the below comment, which made me laugh out loud, from a 1L explaining what she likes to talk about to her boyfriend:
- Skillful arguing is one of the most valuable tools of a lawyer’s trade, but it does not rank highly on lists of traits considered helpful to successful relationships. To a law student, the simplest assertion may be an invitation to a challenging response. If a mate complains, “You don’t give me enough attention,” a law student might reply:
- I polled significant others of law students as to ways they managed to “get away from law school” with their student. They replied with a long list of great ideas, everything from go-carting to let off steam to “no computer days” to spending a night in a nearby hotel as a type of fantasy vacation. Most of their strategies did not involve or require expensive or excitement-filled vacations or other excursions. Often the simplest pleasures of together-time are the most fulfilling.
- No research exists specific to law students, but whether you are a male or female student, if division of household labor is or becomes an issue in your relationships, the obvious solution is to discuss it and have each party agree to bear his or her fair share of the load. Of course, concurring on the definition of “fair share” can be a sticking point, in part because of what I call the “Who Has It Worse?” syndrome, a situation in which both the law student and the gainfully employed partner each think the other has the easier life.
- In general, I am on a very short fuse now, so a comment or suggestion that I would otherwise consider with a grain of salt can set me off or piss me off. There have been two instances where my emotional intelligence decreased to that of a shrieking three-year-old and a normal conversation with my boyfriend turned into an outlandish fight. I transformed from a normal person into a scary, scary beast.
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Chapter 10 Top Five Habits of Successful Students: A C.R.E.D.O. 114 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Students should try to get a sense of what each professor is looking for from the class discussions, and modify their case-briefing style by professor accordingly. For example, Professor X would often want details on the parties, while Professor Y only cared about the rules. Professor Y case. Figuring these things out was very helpful, not only as a 1L, but in upper-level courses with the same professors. I knew that when I had X for Evidence, I’d better know a lot more about the facts than I would for Y’s Biz Org class. In short, students can save a lot of time preparing for class by getting to know their professors.
- What did Dairanetta do with the opportunity she worked so hard to achieve? She defied the naysayers and predictors like her LSAT score, as she has done her entire life when faced with other obstacles. In her first year, she received the CALI award for the best performance in her legal writing course and also awards for Best Trial Brief and Best Oral Advocate. In the summer after her 1L year, she successfully “wrote on” to the law review during the annual write-on competition. (See Chapter 24 for a discussion of law review.) During her 2L year, she and her teammate won the law review’s
- Suppose the professor is defining the tort of assault in class. She explains that “an assault is a volitional act intended to cause imminent apprehension of a harmful or offensive bodily contact to another person, and such apprehension results, directly or indirectly.” This one sentence contains several important words and phrases constituting what we call “operative language.” They include the elements of a “volitional act” (as opposed to an involuntary act), “intent” (specifically a subjective intent to cause an imminent apprehension of a harmful or offensive bodily contact), and the requisite consequence (i.e., imminent apprehension of a harmful or offensive bodily contact results, directly or indirectly). Within these elements, all of the following words have legal significance: “volitional,” “intended,” “imminent,” “apprehension,” “harmful,” “offensive,” and “directly or indirectly.”
- If one were attempting to define the tort of assault on an exam, leaving out or mischaracterizing any of the above terminology would result in a non-rigorous—i.e., wrong—statement of the law. As an example, students often equate “apprehension” with “fear,” but they are not technically the same thing under the law. A person can apprehend a bodily contact from another without being in fear of it, in which case an assault would still occur. Suppose a 98-pound weakling came up to former basketball star Shaquille O’Neal on the street, shook his fist and said, “I’m going to sock you, Shaq!” Shaq is more than seven feet tall and weighs more than 300 pounds. It is unlikely he would be afraid of the 98-pound weakling, yet he could still apprehend that a harmful or offensive bodily contact was imminent. Thus, the elements of the tort of assault would be satisfied.
- Suppose you had a Torts essay exam question involving a child who was injured trespassing on the site of a chemical factory located three blocks from an elementary school when she went swimming in an unguarded, unfenced pool of sulfuric acid that looked like clear water. Which of the five factors from section 339 would you need to apply on the exam to analyze the problem fully and correctly?
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Chapter 8 Reasons to Participate in Class and Ten Tips for Doing It Well 47 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Second, you will better remember the classes in which you participate and feel more satisfaction about your law school experience. I sat through the first half of my 1L year in silence, except when I got called on. Part of me wanted to participate, but I was afraid. The second half I started to open up a bit, raising my hand here and there, and immediately felt better about myself and my law school career. Instead of sitting in class thinking, “I wish I could be one of those brave people who volunteer,” I thought, “Hey, now one of those brave people.”
- Finally, class participation brings the possibility of the tangible benefit of a grade raise, although this should be at the bottom of your list of reasons to participate. Many professors raise grades for class participation. In a system where class ranks often depend on hundredths of a grade point, even modest grade raises can have an effect.
- Commit yourself to being a participant in class discussion. You don’t have to participate every day to make a lasting, good impression in class. Just commit to doing it on a semi-regular basis. Here’s my challenge to you: make a vow (and keep track of it) that at a minimum you will voluntarily participate at least during your first semester of law school. I’m not even talking about once a week in each class, although that would be great. Just once a week total, ideally mixing up your participation among different courses. The typical semester is fourteen weeks long, which means that following this vow will commit you to speak in class voluntarily only fourteen times during the entire semester. Even this modest level of participation will gain you many of the benefits of class participation.
- A colleague at another school told me of a brazen incident in which a professor made a legal point in class, and a student took it on himself to email the author of the casebook class, questioning the professor’s interpretation of the law. The author apparently wrote back saying the student had it right and the professor was wrong. The student then used the email to show up the professor in class. Now, there’s a case for banning computers.
- Approach the Socratic method as a game or sport.
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Chapter 14 A Short Course in Law School Exams 49 results (showing 5 best matches)
- And as with many things in life, be careful what you wish for. In general, while students see the value of formative assessment, they are not fans of heavily weighted midterms in the 1L year, for two reasons. To begin with, first-year students usually perform poorly on their first midterms because they have not yet had a chance to develop and practice the skills needed to identify and analyze legal issues. Second, unless your law school has a midterm exam break where no classes are held, you’ll be required to study for and take your midterms while still juggling the five million balls in the air for your other courses. As one student said:
- 1L’s “biggest surprise” about law school
- Professors use a variety of means to satisfy this directive, including practice exams, midterms, pop quizzes, and writing assignments. Note, however, that while formative assessment tools such as these often count for a portion of a student’s grade, in most cases the majority of the grade is still going to be based on a cumulative final exam covering the entire semester.
- Between the traditional “apply law to facts” essay questions and pure policy questions are a host of other essay questions—which can be long or short—limited in their content and format only by the ability of law professors to think creatively. In other words, there are no limits. A professor could ask you, for example, to draft a statute or answer a list of questions about a given fact pattern or put yourself in the role of the judge and write an opinion, or just about anything else. Such questions may be hybrids that combine legal problem-solving with policy discussion.
- Another oft-used type of essay question is known as a “policy question.” Policy questions don’t test students’ ability to apply law to facts and solve legal problems. Depending on the question, they don’t necessarily even test one’s knowledge or understanding of specific principles of law. Rather, they focus on a student’s ability to construct a thoughtful argument or analysis regarding a policy issue relevant to the course material. Here’s a sample policy question I once used on a Torts II exam:
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Appendix Sample Essay Question 27 results (showing 5 best matches)
- As to the fault element, section 46(1) of the
- Sheldon’s threat was real should prevail in an assault claim against him. An assault occurs where there is a volitional act intended to cause imminent apprehension of a harmful or offensive bodily contact, and such imminent apprehension results. Sheldon volitionally pointed the gun and expressly threatened to shoot audience members. His intent to create an apprehension could be inferred from his conduct. Any audience member who experienced imminent apprehension of a shooting should prevail. Of course, those audience members who believed it was simply a stage antic would not have sound claims because they were not in imminent apprehension of a harmful contact. Thus, an essential element of assault—the result element—would be missing.
- Self-defense and defense of others (0–15).
- Below is an authentic “issue-spotting/problem-solving” law school exam essay question from my course in Torts. Following the question is the model answer I used to grade the exam. The question addresses a handful of issues in the area of intentional torts, a subject most students will study early on and from which most of the examples in the book were drawn.
- As it turned out, Sheldon was not just engaging in theatrics. Many years of abusing controlled substances had finally caught up with him. He was suffering from an insane delusion in which he believed he was on the front line of a war and that the audience was a wave of terrorists about to attack and kill him. He aimed the gun into the crowd and pulled the trigger.
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Chapter 17 Tackling Law School Multiple-Choice Questions 40 results (showing 5 best matches)
- If two opposite answers exist, one of them usually is right. For example, suppose a question included these two answers: “(a) Dinkle will lose because of the doctrine of modified comparative negligence; (b) Dinkle will win because of the doctrine of modified comparative negligence.” These are opposite answers and there’s a good chance one of them would be the correct answer.
- For example, a question may raise what appears to be an intentional tort issue, such as battery, but then the call of the question will ask about a negligence claim, as in “If Bob sues Jill for negligence . . . .” Students will be reading along thinking , and wrongly pick an answer involving battery or intent (battery is an intentional tort), overlooking the call of the question. Or the question may refer to multiple parties, one of whom is clearly a tortfeasor or contract breaker or other wrongdoer, but who is not part of the call of the question. It’s not a bad idea to glance at the call of the question before studying the entire question so you’ll know what to look for as you read.
- To give you a taste of what to expect, here is a sample Torts multiple-choice question used on a recent exam, along with an analysis of the answer in case you’re curious:
- A couple of good reasons exist for including a multiple-choice component on a law school exam. As previously explained, the use of multiple-choice questions allows for broader course coverage than essay questions only. A practical benefit of multiple-choice questions is that, depending on the format the professor uses, they can provide good practice for the bar exam, which is dominated by multiple-choice questions. The Multistate Bar Examination (MBE), administered in forty-nine states and the District of Columbia, is a six-hour marathon of 200 multiple-choice questions focusing mostly on first-year subjects. The MBE covers Civil Procedure, Contracts, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law and Procedure, Evidence, Real Property, and Torts.
- Answers relating to a different topic area than the question seems to be focused on usually will be wrong. In the sample question at the end of the chapter, answers (a) and (e) are good examples of this. The doctrines of strict liability for harm caused by animals and implied primary assumption of risk are foreign to the question topic and are clear wrong answers.
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Copyright Page 6 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 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.
- © 2013 LEG, Inc. d/b/a West Academic Publishing
- © 2016, 2017 LEG, Inc. d/b/a West Academic
- © 2021 LEG, Inc. d/b/a West Academic
- West, West Academic Publishing, and West Academic are trademarks of West Publishing Corporation, used under license.
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Acknowledgments 8 results (showing 5 best matches)
- It’s appropriate that a book written for and about law students was shaped every step of the way with the help of law students. Students who provided direct assistance are thanked below, but I’m indebted to all of my students collectively. Even after thirty years as a law professor, I learn something new from law students nearly every day.
- Finally, I’m grateful to all the great folks at West Academic Publishing for their assistance and support. It’s an honor to be part of such a distinguished publishing family.
- One of the many fortunate aspects of being a law professor is working with talented research assistants, all of whom epitomize what it means to be a great law student. Research assistants at the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law who contributed to this book include Kaitlyn Abernathy, Joshua Baker, Shea Barker, Chelsea L. Brown, Lindsay N. Castellaw, Quynh-Anh Dang, James Duckworth, Lindsey Gill, Russell Hayes, Sally Joyner, Julia M. Kavanagh, Jane Marie Lewis, Natalie Fox Malone, Alex McWhirter, Taylor Oyaas, Megan McKenzie Reed, Elizabeth Rogers, Sarah Hearn Sexton, Meredith Blake Stewart, James Stone, Mary L. Wagner, Charlotte Nichols Wallace, and Todd V. Williams.
- Since beginning work on the first edition in 2006, I’ve solicited comments from hundreds of law students, mostly through surveys, but also informally via email, Facebook, and conversations in and out of the classroom. Most of them are current or former students at the University of Memphis, but they also include former students of mine at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law, Florida International University College of Law, and Golden Gate University School of Law, as well as students from other schools.
- I received help from many law professors along the way. Particular thanks to the five legal writing professors who generously contributed so much of their time and expertise to Chapter 18: Kimberly K. Boone, Christine Nero Coughlin, Sandy C. Patrick, Joan Malmud Rocklin, and David Walter. Mary Pat Treuthart read and commented on a draft, offering her usual insightful, blunt, and often hilarious wisdom. Other professors who shared their expertise include: Thomas E. Baker, Coleen M. Barger, Sara R. Benson, Leslie Burton, Markita D. Cooper, John M.A. DiPippa, June F. Entman, Barbara Glesner Fines, Judith D. Fischer, Elizabeth P. Foley, Jose Gabilondo, DeLeith Gossett, Larry Howell, Barbara Kritchevsky, Nancy Levit, Ernest F. Lidge, III, Jana R. McCreary, Kathleen A. Miller, Steven J. Mulroy, Martha M. Peters, Janet L. Richards, Ruth Anne Robbins, Ediberto Román, David S. Romantz, Daniel Schaffzin, Katherine Traylor Schaffzin, Eugene Shapiro, Sheila J. Simon, Kevin H. Smith, Stephen...
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West Academic Publishing’s Emeritus Advisory Board 15 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Dean and Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. Chair of Public Interest Law University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law
- Robert A. Sullivan Emeritus Professor of Law University of Michigan
- Professor of Law Emeritus, University of San Diego Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Michigan
- Professor of Law, Chancellor and Dean Emeritus University of California, Hastings College of the Law
- Professor of Law Emeritus, Pepperdine University Professor of Law Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles
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Table of Contents 49 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Publication Date: May 7th, 2021
- ISBN: 9781684679386
- Subject: Academic Success
- Series: Academic and Career Success
- Type: Academic/Prof. Development
- Description: Assigned as required or recommended reading at law schools throughout the country, 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 updated, revised, and expanded fourth 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. McClurg is an award-winning professor who taught at six different law schools.
