Finals are fast approaching. Everyone has a different way to study. Some people can study with their iPod blaring and others need total silence (good luck finding that). A lot of people can study in groups. I never could. What I did do to get me through law school was to OUTLINE. Outlining is the most boring thing on the planet, but the tedious plodding will pound the law into your head.
If anyone has another tried and true way to get through give me a shout.
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About Me
- JFKU-Berkeley Law Library
- The Berkeley campus of JFKU Law School opened in the Fall of 2008. Our focus is public interest law. The library is open Monday through Thursday, from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. and open 10 a.m until 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
3 comments:
When I had the time to do so, I found that I did best in courses where I created "decision trees" from my outlines. The outlining helped me to identify and learn the legal principles, but going the extra step to create roadmaps for analysis helped me to approach exam questions in a more disciplined and systematic manner.
The only thing more tedious and stressful than preparing outlines is completing your bar application. But ya gotta do one to get to the next. So, I agree, prepare your own outlines from your notes and/or hornbooks and when you are done, then see if you can trade outlines with your classmates. Reading other people's outlines and integrating notes from those is an excellent way to get you thinking critically about the material and what you need to know for the exam.
My background was a little different than your typical law student (engineering) so I came at my finals with a slightly different approach than most of my classmates. Study groups, horn books, and class outlines were completely alien concepts to me. You worked in a group to prepare a lab report, but you certainly didn’t collaborate to discuss the finer points of a Newtonian fluid flowing through a pipe of changing diameter. You sat down and ground through equations until your fingers were numb. My approach may not work for everyone, but the important thing is to do what works best for you. If you don’t learn well by working with a group, then don’t freak out when everyone else joins a study group.
I didn’t so much make outlines as I recopied/condensed my class notes to highlight the main concepts of a class. The mere act of rewriting everything helped drill concepts into my head even though I felt like a scrivener. Horn books are essential if the textbook for your class is poor, but are really a luxury so long as the book or professor are good. One resource that I didn’t discover until the second semester of my first year was the test file. Some professors will put copies of old tests on file in the library or even online. Get your hands on as many of these as you can find and review them. You likely won’t see questions repeated on your test, but you will get a sense of what concepts the professor thinks are important so you can focus your study time. Ask your friendly librarian to see the test file.
As a side note, old tests are also important when you get ready to take the state bar and are absolutely critical to passing the patent bar (if you are masochist that thinks one bar exam isn’t enough). I would estimate that half of the questions on the patent bar exam I took came directly from previous exams with only slight variations at best.
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