Reviews for Law school confidential

The average rating for Law school confidential based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-21 00:00:00 Gareth Hampton Very useful ! Highly recommend it for a pre-law school read. What I took away from it: WHY GO TO LAW SCHOOL: - I like being challenged intellectually daily; law school teaches you to "think" in a way that even the best undergraduate education does not. Law school feels natural given my love of advocacy, reading, writing and expressing my ideas into words. I relish the challenge of thinking on my feet. I like laws pragmatic, "let's get things done" attitude. "For me, college was spent developing a firm idea of all the things that I wanted to change about the world, but it didn't give me the tools I needed to bring about those changes." Those changes came later, with compassion training at Stanford Medical School and the law degree. Law school: the hours are long, but they are usually happily spent absorbing material. Advice: I generally read for about 4 hours a day, six days a week. ADVICE TO SELF: Get up at 4 am each morning, read until 8 am each morning. But go to bed by 8 pm each night. Read in the morning when you can absorb the material and your mind is fresh. Keep a binder for each class, with dividers that have the date each class meets. Put in a page into each divider with the case that you briefed. Read the case, brief it, and then put it in your binder for that class. Keep your notes from that class along with it, on a separate piece of looseleaf hole-punched paper. Read ahead, never for the following day. Start out by getting up at 4 am, making yourself a green smoothie, reading for 4 hours. Then make yourself breakfast. After class, only exercise and eat dinner. Don't need to do anything at all after class. Keep the same schedule every single day. Rough: "Law school is no place to try to find yourself. Law school is the kind of place that will force you to repress just about every other competing interest in your life as you struggle to to stay afloat. There are no free summers and no vacations. Once you matriculate in law school and the train starts rolling, it is hard to get off. If you want to be an academic, you should consider going to the most prestigious schools, ones that will give you many chances to interact with professors and develop your ideas into scholarship. "A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than it is necessary." - Seneca Before law school: "Having a working knowledge of the framework of the 'black-letter' law in each first-year subject at the beginning of law school would have been immensely helpful." For law school, GET A BIG DESK. Print your resume on heavy white bond paper - or the best paper you can afford. "It is enough if one tries to merely comprehend a little of this mystery every day." - Albert Einstein CIVIL PROCEDURE You will discover that an elegant, sensible structure underlies the rules of procedure-- and that the system actually makes sense. A civil action is an action brought to enforce private rights and/or seek private remedies in which money damages or some other court order is sought. A civil action = any noncriminal case. Civil Procedure at its most basic level is the study of the rules, procedures, regulations, and process governing these noncriminal actions in state and federal courts. The first thing to realize when you're reading a CivPro case is that you're not really concerned about the underlying substantive law dispute. It's not the contract issue or the First Amendment claim you need to evaluate. Instead, in Civil Procedure, you need to be on the lookout only for the procedural questions underlying the case that the court was forced to decide. !!!!! Federal Rules of Civil Procedure = extremely useful, a compendium of 86 rules that governs every aspect of bringing a civil action in the federal court system. Reading the applicable rule will greatly aid your understanding of the case law precipitated by that rule. It also states the intended function of each rule, and the purpose of any amendment thereto. The Federal Rules often hold the key to ambiguous language in a rule, or even to an entire case! What you will learn in Civil Procedure 1) how to determine whether you bring a case in state court, federal court, or both, and which courts within those systems are available to hear different cases. this question raises the issues of 'subject matter jurisdiction,' 'personal jurisdiction,' 'proper venue,' and 'removal.' 2) how lawsuits are shaped through the evidence-collecting procedures of interrogatories, discovery, and depositions, joinder of additional culpable parties after the commencement of the lawsuit, and supplemental jurisdiction over additional claims involving those parties; how courts can hear counterclaims and cross-claims between these parties; complex litigation and class actions. 3) which law governs the case - federal statutory law, state statutory law, or common law. and if state law, then which state's law. In considering these issues, you will encounter a) the infamous 'Eerie question' which requires you to determine whether the issues raised in a federal court case implicate federal procedural law or state substantive law, and accordingly, which law to apply and then b) the choice-of-law conflicts that arise when citizens of different states appear in a federal court, each alleging that the law of his own state should govern the lawsuit; plaintiffs, of course, seek the court that will apply the most favorable law to their claims. 4) motion to dismiss; motion for summary judgment; motion for judgment as a matter of law 5) res judicata - claim preclusion 6) collateral estoppel - issue preclusion Beautifully worded: "When the clouds do finally part, the elegance of the system of American civil procedure will be yours to keep." TORTS A tort is an act or omission, perpetrated by one individual against another, for which a civil remedy is available. BRIEFING CASES - traditional way "If I could do it all over again, I would have taken an entirely different approach to my study strategy during those first few months. I would have been more diligent about keeping up with the reading, forced myself not to get bogged down in the minutiae of cases, started using commercial outlines sooner, and started making my own outlines right away. Name of the case: Citation in proper form: Procedural posture, how the case got to the court it's in: Relevant facts: Carefully frame the question presented: Answer it: Add a few lines to flesh out the court's reasoning: Hook: How the case advanced the ball in that particular area of the law. why was the case significant? What did this case contribute to its area of law? HOW TO STUDY Step 1: Start each night with a lesson from your commercial outline. One of the most critical secrets of law school success is being able to put the hundreds of cases and case excerpts you'll read for each law school class in some kind of context. The most efficient way to do this is to start with the commercial outline. Why reinvent the wheel struggling for countless hours to create a context when someone has already done this for you? You're looking to put each night's reading in context, and consequently each night's reading should start with a reading of the relevant section of the applicable hornbook. "If I could do it all over again, I would focus much more on the 'black-letter' law- the holding and how each case advanced the ball in that particular area of the law. a) Grab your syllabus and determine what pages in the textbook your professor has assigned for tonight. Go to the textbook and see what the general topic heading is. If you're having trouble determining what it is, don't forget to check the table of contents of the book. When you've determined the general topic area, Write it down. Next, flip through the span of pages the professor assigned, and Write down the name of every case that appears. There will be 'major cases,' the ones that are excerpted in edited form, and 'squibs,' the cases that are mentioned and discussed in a paragraph or two in the professor's linking text between major cases. b) In commercial outlines find the pages where the cases you've listed are discussed. Read that section of the commercial outline for understanding, marking the holdings of your listed cases, and any explanatory text discussing how the cases affect each other. Don't try to memorize things or write anything down yet - just read for general understanding. What you're looking for is an overview of the night's reading in that subject - a context in which to put the cases you're about to read. Think of the law as a series of somewhat linear lengths of chain. Each case you read adds another link to the development of the law. That the magic epiphany you're striving for in each of the subjects you'll study in law school - to be able to follow the cases, link by link down the chain, until you finally grasp the big picture of how all the cases work together to develop and govern a particular area of law, and where the unanswered questions remain, and what the next links in the chain might look like. c) GREEN: facts YELLOW: critical legal reasoning PINK/RED: holding; court; judge; procedural posture, deposition (affirmed reversed, remanded) BLUE: important precedents cited and their holdings ORANGE: important dissenting remarks Now do the case book reading. First, skim the case completely from beginning to end. Just read. No pen, no highlighter, nothing. Force yourself not to get too bogged down in minutiae. Just get a sense for how the case is organized, what the case is about, what the holding is, and how much good supporting reasoning is provided. Resist the urge to mark anything. An average-size case should take you ten to fifteen minutes to get through. When you've finished skimming the case, you're ready to start briefing it. Highlight SPARINGLY. Mark the court, writing judge, procedural posture, and holding in red, the most relevant facts in green, the most persuasive or historically important reasoning in yellow, significant case precedent in blue, and andy notable reasoning in the dissent in orange. You should see a lot more black-and-white, unmarked passages than you do highlighted sections. Then go back and brief it on a separate piece of paper and put into your binder for that week. d) In class, when called on, you'll be able to look at your casebook to answer questions (or your brief) Take notes on loose-leaf paper and put it in that same section, or take notes on your brief. e) The most crucial step in the learning process and also the hardest step, because it requires the most discipline. Every day after class, for every class you had that day, you need to consolidate your knowledge into a concise but comprehensive outline summarizing that day's material. Here's how to do it: - Go somewhere quiet where you can spread out your materials and plug in your laptop. - Start just as you did last night - by typing in the names of the cases you read in chronological order. Be sure to include the name of the court and the date of the decision to aid understanding and avoid possible confusion. - Now, taking each case one at a time, write down 4 sentences of the most relevant facts. Keep the facts short and simple - only the critical ones to the opinion. You may want to set off these facts in italics to make them more easily distinguishable. - Next, go back to the casebook, and after looking quickly for red, plug in the holding. you may want to set this off in bold to distinguish it from the facts. Force yourself to make the holding as succinct and clear as you can. - Now go back to your class notes and see if the professor had anything interesting to say about the case historically, politically, or contextually. What, if anything, did you scribble down in the margins? Skip a line after the holding and plug it in. - Finally, go back to the commercial outline where you started last night and remind yourself of what it had to say about the case. What did you highlight? Did the outline help put the case in a framework by linking it to the cases that preceded and postdated it? Did the outline make any other remarks that your professor didn't? If so, add these notes from the commercial outline right after your professor's comments. - Do this for every case you covered, in every subject you had that day, during every day of the semester. It will probably take you about an hour, on average, to update your outline for each class. That is a heck of a lot less than it would take you to brief every case, and the advantage is that you are both actively engaging the material and incrementally building your blueprint of the course for the exam. Assuming you have three classes a day, you'll be spending three hours every day developing your class outlines. This is absolutely crucial to your mastery of the material, and it is by far the most valuable time you'll spend studying. If you keep to this schedule daily (which requires a great deal of discipline), at the end of the semester you'll have an outline for each class which will represent in one neat, concise package, everything you need to worry about for the exam. - By December, your outlines should be done and you'll have time to start taking practice tests. Work through prior exams with a study group, compare answers, and then go back and augment your outline as necessary. It's very systematic. SCHEDULE 4 - 8 am: Green smoothie. Read for your next day's classes in bed. Then scrambled eggs with brodo. 9 - 10 am: Class 1 10:30 - 12 pm: Class 2 12 - 1 pm: Lunch 1:30 - 3 pm: Class 3 3 - 6 pm: In law school building, write an outline for Classes 1 - 3 Done for the night. 8 pm: in bed, asleep. HOW TO PHRASE QUESTIONS: "Professor, I don't understand this. I'm confused as to how it's foreseeable to the guy on the hill that his gas spill would cause a fire that far away. Can you explain that?" (instead of "but I thought__"). Understand that when you express confusion and ask the professor to break a direct question, she's more likely to break the Socratic dialogue and respond with a direct answer rather than another confusing hypo. The most respected students in law school were the ones who showed respect for others. They had humility, they weren't afraid to admit their confusion. When you want to speak, or add on something to what someone else said, a good way to start is: "What caught my attention..." Be nice to everyone! Everyone can be an ally in the law field later. "In law school, and in your legal career, your reputation is your most valuable asset. Once you've lost it, it's really, really hard to get back and you may never outrun it either. You never know where the legal road will lead you, and the law community is smaller than you think. The people you mistreat (or are condescending to) today may be in the position to remember those acts one day." The best answer when someone asks you about grades: "I don't discuss grades" or just simply "I did okay." Professors sometimes give the same exam twice... so work through every single exam question, and review the model answer in advance, incorporate it into your outline. But don't do exams until you've finished your class outline. If looking for a job and emailing contacts, end with the phrase: "Any assistance or suggestions you can provide would be greatly appreciated." It's a good idea to do research for a professor or intern for a judge 1 L summer. EXAMS: "The classes in which I had the greatest success were those classes in which I had prepared my own outline, taken time to review the outline and become familiar with it, and then taken time to do practice exams using the outline so i could get comfortable using it." The particular areas of law your professors are researching and writing about, they will likely test you on. When you first get an exam, just calmly read over it. Just read over the whole thing and let the subconscious mind begin working on the answers. WRITING / PUBLISHING case note = you're basically writing a case brief on steroids comment = lengthy, thorough evaluation of the controlling law in a particular area. most fertile ground for comments is in areas of the law where splits among the circuit court of appeals have left the status of the law in doubt or disarray. inquire about circuit splits, vagaries in statutes, policy disagreements, or poorly reasoned US Supreme Court decisions. most professors are happy to assist students with journal articles. writing comment without advice from faculty member is inadvisable. Why do you want this job? I want to anchor my legal education in the practical world. as a 2-year associate, bill all your time. "The one thing that good lawyers know is that an issue is almost never completely black-and-white. Therefore, a good lawyer recognizes and admits the weaknesses in a position. In other words, 'We think the answer should be this, we recognize that there is some authority to the contrary, and this is our response to that.' Don't puff your position, allow for the fact that it might not be absolutely correct, and work with that. That's rare, but it immediately sets a good lawyer apart." - Chief Justice Dalianis, page 4o1

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-12 00:00:00 Jonathan Tumin I'm reviewing this from the perspective of someone who is thinking about Law School but has not yet applied or attended. It's very useful, very practical. It makes the difficult reality very sharp which is necessary for something so expensive and so stressful and so long-term as law school and a career in it. A couple of things I found a little meh: 1) There is a lot of law school jargon right from the beginning and it's rarely explained. That's a little annoying for most people who are not in law school. For instance, there's not much of an explanation on what a clerkship actually is. There's very little explanation even as to what a lawyer is and what their days are like which I think is important to understand if you're considering it as a career. Some careers are pretty obvious but the only thing most people know about lawyers is trial-related. The book keeps telling us very few lawyers actually SEE a court but doesn't really explain what most lawyers do most of the time. And when they do mention things, it's in jargon. 2) The book, I believe, is mostly targeted to people who have had law school in mind since high school. They went to prestigious undergraduate universities and are determined to nail a spot in the top 15 law schools. While I think that is well and good, I am not convinced the majority of law students are like this. I'm not even convinced the majority of successful lawyers and judges came from this. There is pretty much nothing for someone considering law as a career change. If I do go to law school, I do think I would refer to this book again. And if I did, I will happily review it after graduating to weigh in on really just how much of it is accurate, useful, realistic, etc.