In law school, students are expected to read multiple cases to identify rules that will be applied on exams. Using non-law sources, students will learn how to extract individual rules from multiple articles to create one synthesized rule that can be used to solve new problems.
The lesson introduces several common rule structures and tests recognition of each. The lesson challenges the student to recognize the rule of law as it appears in several cases.
This lesson will discuss ways to identify the legally significant facts within cases using pre-reading strategies.
On completion of the lesson, the student will be able to:
1. Define legally significant facts.
2. Create context for cases using the textbook's table of contents and previous class discussions.
3. Identify legally significant facts in a court opinion.
This lesson focuses on case briefing. The lesson will guide students through cases identifying the most important part of cases to prepare for classes.
On completion of the lesson, the student will be able to:
1. Identify different parts of a case brief.
2. Categorize different parts of a judicial opinion into a case brief.
3. Restate the legally significant facts from a case.
4. Restate the legal rules in a case.
5. Identify or construct the holding of the opinion.
This lesson will run through critical considerations to think about before stepping into the law school classroom, or the "theater of learning" for the first time! Through a series of interactive diagnostic questions and teaching pages, the lesson explores many themes of first semester, including choosing your seat, class participation and how to handle the Socratic method, pre- and post-class prep, time management, using professors' office hours, and how the basics of the court system and functions of each level of court generate the "case method" of law school teaching and learning.
Law school will consume your life during the three or four years that you are enrolled. But that doesn’t mean that life stops. Bills still have to be paid; people still get sick; the rest of the world keeps rolling on.
There will likely be a time during your legal education when you need help with something. The good news is that there are plenty of people available to help. You are not alone. Whatever you are going through, someone else has gone through too. It’s important to reach out for help, so you can work through your problems, without hurting your academic performance.
One of the best ways to learn and remember something is to connect it to something that you already know. Once you have made that connection, it becomes easier to use the new information, because you are connecting it to something that you already understand. Making these connections is called transfer. You can transfer vertically (i.e. from one topic in criminal law to another, or from Contracts 1 to Contracts 2), or you can transfer horizontally from course to course (i.e. from contracts to criminal law).
This lesson focuses upon the concept of metacognition and teaches you how to enhance your understanding about how you learn to better improve your study, organizational, test-taking and self-assessment skills with the goal of improving your performance in law school.
The lesson should help you better understand your individual learning process and show you how to use this information to develop study and test-taking skills needed for success in law school.
You may have heard that lawyers are precise. It’s true. In law school, you will spend a lot of time discussing the meaning of a singular word or placement of a comma.
This lesson provides time management strategies for law students.
On completion of the lesson, the student will be able to:
1. Understand the importance of effective time management.
2. Account for school and personal time commitments.
3. Create a daily, weekly, and semester time management plan.