In the past six years I have worked with students from four very different law schools. The outsider's most frequent question is "Aren't there big differences in the students? The students from X must need less help than the students from Y." My observation is that the differences among the students are minute compared to the similarities among them. Very few of them realize that the skills they acquired as undergraduates will not serve them well as law students. Superior students from prestigious schools are not immune to this sobering revelation. Students who are accustomed to being guided by clearly written, well organized textbooks are bewildered by the law school casebook. Students who wrote good essays in undergraduate school are not prepared for the issue-spotter law school type. Those who are used to being rewarded for "finding the right answer" do not adjust well to law school exams where the analysis is important, not the answer.
The situation is made worse by the lack of guidance given by law school faculty and the overabundance of advice, often conflicting, given by other students or study aid books. Professors are often very interested in the issues on the cutting edge of their field, and they prefer to use class time for a discussion of these issues rather than ground students in legal theories that underlie these discussions. Students are incredulous when they are told that their exams will require demonstrating their knowledge of those very theories their professors downplayed.
Many students are entering the most competitive school they have attended. With no instruction from faculty, most decide that the only way to do better than the others is to learn more. They construct long outlines (better called summaries) of their courses and try to memorize every detail. Although many schools provide exam questions from prior years to students to help them prepare, rarely do they provide answers. Therefore, students are reluctant to try to answer the questions, thereby exposing themselves to their own inadequacies, without first memorizing as much of their outline/security blanket as possible. Many students arrive at their first semester finals never having written out an answer to a released question. although they may have read the questions trying to identify the legal issue presented. In all the schools with which I am affiliated, the two most common causes of poor performance are:
This situation is guaranteed disaster. I try to avoid the disaster in lectures and in the books by:
1. Demonstrating that the best way to learn course material is to produce a short, rule based outline. Start from a skeleton, then fill in detail shown to be important by class discussion about casebook reading.
2. Suggesting that students must be active learners. Although they may have succeeded in undergraduate school by learning their course material in the order it appeared in the book, it doesn't work in law school. Casebooks have very different structures, and professors have different approaches to the material. This means the order the student learns the law may not be the optimum order to use it to analyze a legal problem. Since many first year students have trouble reordering course material on their own, reorderings are suggested by my materials when necessary.
3. Proving to students that professors write exam questions carefully, and their success will depend upon their correct analysis of every word. This is often a surprise, because students have become accustomed to wordy cases. This is best demonstrated by reading with students many fact patterns and answers one legal rule at a time. They then see how a professor signals that the "intent" element is not a problem in one question, but is the major issue in another.
4. Providing opportunities for writing that stress the need to train to be a good writer. This entails reading fact patterns with answers about one legal rule at a time so that they can recognize the usual components of a question in this area. It also entails writing out answers to questions for which they already have answers. Writing is a skill that can best be acquired when students are not concentrating on the law at the same time. The skills of writing good rules, arguing both sides of an issue, and composing a well organized paragraph can be learned by reading an answer to a question and trying to write it in ones own words. When students realize how hard this is, they are more likely to take the need for exam practice seriously. My lectures and the books provide many examples of questions with both notes and complete answers to encourage students to PRACTICE.