1L of a Ride, a Well-Traveled Professor's Roadmap to Success in the First Year of Law School by Andrew McClurg

Author:Andrew McClurg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640200449
Publisher: West Academic
Published: 2017-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

Must I Really Make Outlines?—Yes!

Only one answer exists for administering this huge inventory of knowledge: preparing an outline for each course. Most law students do prepare course outlines. Certainly most 230

successful students do. Many students prepare two outlines for each course, a comprehensive main outline and a secondary capsule outline they use for review immediately before the exam.

Some students attempt to rely solely on outlines prepared by students who took the course in earlier years. These are abundantly available. It sounds like a good plan on the surface. Why go through all the work to prepare an outline if someone else has already done it for the same course taught by the same professor? Especially if you can lay your hands on a really great outline composed by a top student, it seems like a no-brainer. And, in fact, you probably can obtain great outlines prepared by top students. Every law school has its share of famous, ridiculously thorough student outlines for particular courses that get passed down from class to class. Back at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, for example, every 1L coveted a copy of “Bob’s Bible,” a student outline for the late legendary Professor Robert R. Wright’s Property course that was so complete it even included Professor Wright’s jokes.

But it’s not a good plan to rely on outlines prepared by others. The reason the students who made the great outlines came out on top was because they made the great outlines, not because they had the great outlines.

As with case-briefing, the process of constructing outlines is more important than the final product. Making outlines is what forces you to organize, synthesize, and, hence, really learn the material. Assembling them will help you discover the framework of the subject into which all of the rules you’ve learned fit. Composing an outline and updating it throughout the semester also requires the periodic review of the material so essential to law school success. Moreover, because people have different learning styles and process information differently, even excellent outlines prepared by someone else are not likely to present the material in the manner or form in which you learned it.

Similarly, resist the temptation to rely exclusively on commercial outlines, even those keyed to particular casebooks. Commercial study aid outlines are not adequate by themselves because they will not contain all of the material the professor covered and will include a lot of material the professor didn’t 231

cover. Just as important, they will not present the material in the same way—either substantively or structurally—as the professor presented it and expects to hear it back on the exam.

It’s easy when reading exams to spot the students who relied heavily on outlines other than their own. They state legal doctrines in formulations foreign to the professor or discuss cases the professor doesn’t or no longer covers.

Having said all that, let me emphasize that both previously prepared student outlines and commercial outlines can be extremely helpful supplements for filling in gaps in your own outlines.

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