Adam Engelhart

Introduction to Law School Supplements

August 22nd, 2008

I’ve talked with a few friends recently about law-school supplements, and I decided it’d be a good idea to write down my ideas and impressions about where the different supplements are most useful. So here we go! (Well, after the jump, anyway.)

Outlines

Law students are a compulsive, organized lot, and this shows in their study habits. The generally accepted way to study for law-school courses is by preparing a hierarchical outline of the course. (Erwin Chemerinsky, an eminent constitutional-law scholar and my con law instructor from Bar/Bri, can lecture to his Bar/Bri outline from memory, and knows all the headings and their indices by heart. This degree of eideticism is, to say the least, extremely rare.) There are arguments for and against this practice, of course, but it’s popular for a reason.

In any event, there are also commercial outlines, ones prepared by business concerns for the law-student market. Also, some students decide to make their own outlines available to their successors by contributing to outline banks, maintained by student associations, journals, and even area copy shops. These can be useful for obtaining information specific to the course you’re taking, but the quality is far less uniform–some are excellent, some are terrible.

Gilbert’s

Gilbert’s might be the most popular series of commercial law-school outlines. They’re good, basic outlines, applicable to a wide variety of casebooks. (Virtually all commercial outlines will include correlation tables, by which you’ll be able to determine which pages of the outline correspond to which pages of the casebook.)

The Bar/Bri outlines are very similar to Gilbert’s, which makes sense as they’re both owned by the Thomson empire. However, they’re a bit condensed, which can be a good thing–once I acquired the habit of reading outlines before I went to the casebook, the Bar/Bri outlines were my go-to study aid.

(Alas, there is no series of supplements called “Sullivan’s.” Note to self: investigate this; there may be an underserved market here. Consider setting outlines to music, and particularly, a patter song re. exceptions to the hearsay rule.)

Emanuel’s

Emanuel’s outlines are similar to Gilbert’s, but they’re from a different publisher and much more detailed. This isn’t necessarily a good thing–as a 1L, the last thing you need is more text to read–but it may well be your best bet if you’re unclear on a subject after you’ve read your casebook and a less exhaustive outline. Also, they tend to include a capsule summary at the beginning, which can be helpful.

Nutshell manuals

Nutshells are another product of the West Group. Unlike the similarly-titled series from O’Reilly, they’re aimed more strictly at professionals. While Nutshell manuals exist for first-year subjects, they really shine in more specialized areas, where you might need to quickly get up to speed in a particular topic area after you have a general grounding in law. If you’re a 2L, 3L, recent graduate, or practicing attorney who needs to learn the rudiments of a given area of law quickly, the Nutshell books are worth a look. Most legal bookstores carry a wide variety of Nutshell manuals, which is an advantage.

Canned briefs

First-year law students frequently learn by “briefing” cases, which means extracting the issue, rule applied, facts, analysis, and conclusion from a case and writing them down. Canned briefs are commercially-written case briefs for a given area of law, and usually a given edition of a casebook. They can be helpful for navigating a casebook, but I think they might be going a little far towards doing your work for you (although I’m more accepting of study aids than most). High Court Case Summaries and Legalines are examples, but the latter is more of an outline that follows a given textbook very strictly.

Hornbooks

Hornbooks are named after one of the earliest forms of educational publications, a wooden paddle with a piece of paper attached to it, covered with a thin, translucent slice of horn. Modern hornbooks generally run somewhere between one and three hundred pages, giving law students a grounding in “black-letter law”–simple, point-blank statements of the law at is, without historical overview or factual backgrounds. In terms of IRAC, hornbooks concentrate quite strongly on the R and C half of the equation. There’s a good argument in favor of this approach, as reading cases and studying legal writing and research can teach you to spot Is and do A, and R/C is the part where you need to load the most substantive, as opposed to procedural, knowledge into your brain. In any event, I think hornbooks are nearly as popular as commercial outlines as study aids go, and possibly more useful.

Treatises and legal encyclopedias

Treatises are the burly sasquatch of the legal supplement world. They’re in-depth, exhaustively detailed guides to an area of law, used by students, academics, and practitioners alike. They tend to be extensive, multi-volume treatments; Corbin on Contracts and Moy’s Walker on Patents are examples. However, there are some treatises that only run to a volume or two, which tend to be the most valuable to law students (as well as the most capable of fitting into a student budget). Prof. Chemerinsky, mentioned supra, has a treatise called Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies that I found most helpful during my con law course.

The line between hornbooks and one-volume treatises is quite thin–some people consider Chemerinsky’s con law treatise an in-depth hornbook, and fewer (but still a noteworthy minority, and largely because it’s part of a series) consider Glannon’s Examples and Explanations for civ pro a short treatise.

Legal encyclopedias are similar, except that they tend to be organized alphabetically, rather than hierarchically, and to cover multiple areas of law, or even law in general. American Jurisprudence (AmJur) and Witkin are examples.

Practice guides

We’re getting somewhat far afield here, but I thought that these were worth a mention. Practice guides are very similar to treatises, but with a strongly practical bent, as befits their name. Essentially, they’re HOWTOs for prosecuting a suit or otherwise practicing in a certain area of law. If you’re wondering what a practicing attorney would do in the situation you’re in, this is the place to go. The Rutter guides are very well-regarded, especially in California; ask your law librarian in other jurisdictions.

Nontraditional study aids

At the risk of winning the Pulitzer for "Gee, Thanks For Telling Us That, Captain Obvious," the Internet has made it a lot easier for people to share information. This includes the information contained in legal study guides, a lot of which has ended up on Wikipedia. If you’re just having trouble with a small part of your course, or don’t know whether you want to commit to buying a printed study aid, try searching the Web for an outline or Wikipedia article on the topic about which you’re unsure. Just remember that there’s no guarantee of quality, and if you find something on Wikipedia that’s incompletely explained, log in and set them straight–it’ll do Wikipedia good for them to get better information, and it’ll do you good for composing your thoughts and writing them down, and in the process, learning the material much better. In fact, I can almost guarantee that if you substantially research and edit or write a Wikipedia article in an area of law, you’ll be essentially untouchable on that area of the exam.

Final thoughts

There are a wide range of perspectives on supplements. Some regard them as a crutch for the lazy, others as an essential addition to the law-school curriculum. I tend to fall towards the latter end of the spectrum, but with the strong caveat that it’s important to be selective. Law students (and lawyers, and law professors) have a lot of text to read. More text is the last thing that you need, unless it earns its keep by being enlightening. Therefore, I recommend that you:

• Read ahead. Have a quick look at an outline before you read that day’s cases, so you have some idea of what’s coming and can organize your thoughts a little bit. Cases aren’t novels; you shouldn’t worry about spoiling the ending. In fact, you should worry about not spoiling the ending–you’ll absorb the case’s lessons better if you know what’s coming. (Spoilers: Ms. Palsgraf and Mr. Tompkins lose, but Mr. Miranda and the State of Washington win.)
• Read judiciously. As I mentioned above, you’ve got a lot of reading ahead of you. Don’t think that you need to read more to understand if you’re able to keep up. (However, I still think that scanning an outline ahead of reading the casebook will help. You’re not going for mastery, just a nodding familiarity.)
• Ask around. As every traveller knows, there’s no substitute for local advice. If you’re in the market for study aids, ask your classmates, students who have taken your course, and even your professors if they have any they’d recommend. I’d say that Glannon’s Examples and Explanations for civ pro and Chemerinsky’s con law treatise were the most valuable study aids I used in law school, and the former was recommended by a fellow student and the latter by my professor. (Also, many professors, especially those who have written textbooks, have written hornbooks or treatises as well–if you’re taking a course from the person who wrote the book, looking for a study aid they wrote couldn’t hurt.)
• Consider buying used. The law of contracts, property, and torts have changed very little indeed over the past few years, and even more rapidly-changing areas like con law and civ pro are still pretty stable, and the changes are easy to spot. I’ve even heard of people who have gotten by with an older version of the casebook, pulling whichever cases weren’t in it off the Web, Lexis, or Westlaw. I didn’t live that close to the edge, but as far as study aids, older ones are well worth considering. (Incidentally, the fact that I have a number of used study aids up for sale on Craigslist has virtually nothing to do with this.)

I hope the foregoing has helped. If you have anything to add, please comment.

Entry Filed under: Law