Subject Bibliography in Law: Surviving Law School

Law students rarely have experience answering problem questions before university, and lecturers concentrate on teaching content rather than the exam skills needed. This book bridges the gap on how to transpose knowledge and research into structured and coherent answers to problem questions while earning a law degree. Aimed at undergraduates, international students, and foundation and SQE candidates, the book gives a step-by-step study guide on how to navigate what a problem question is asking you to do. It deconstructs the process using examples from a range of different fields of law, providing essential guidance from research and critical thinking to style and tone. Including a range of examples to test yourself against, this is an indispensable resource for any law student who wants to tackle problem questions with confidence.

Do you want to do well in Law from day one? Law is a challenging and competitive subject to study at university. You need to become familiar with its peculiar language and complicated practices as quickly as possible if you want to do well. Drawing on the experiences of hundreds of students, Studying Law at University demystifies your law course. With reliable tips and practical suggestions, it shows you how to: understand key legal concepts; read cases; take useful notes; become an active learner; manage your time; write law essays; sit law exams. Updated to take into account the increasing use of the internet, this second edition of Studying Law at University tells you everything you need to know to get good marks and enjoy your studies.

Many books give law students advice about how to navigate through their first year of law school. This book strives to be something different. The purpose of "One L of a Year" is to focus on the reading, studying and testing strategies used by the most successful law students. This book is more than advice--it is a learning guide based upon empirical research and statistical correlations between law student learning and their law school GPAs. Most importantly, this book attempts to show you what high-ranking law students have done to achieve success during their first year. It's one thing to read about how to take a law school essay exam--it's quite another thing to see examples of student essays, outlines, legal memoranda, and multiple choice questions. With drive and determination, most students can get through law school. However, "One L of a Year" gives you the research-based skills to maximize your own success.

So you¿ve arrived at university, you¿ve read the course handbook and you¿re ready to learn the law. But is knowing the law enough to get you the very best marks? And what do your lecturers mean when they say you need to develop critical and analytical skills? When is it right to put your own views forward? What are examiners looking for when they give feedback to say that your work is too descriptive? This book explores what it means to think critically and offers practical tips and advice for students to develop the process, skill and ability of thinking critically while studying law. The book investigates the big questions such as: What is law? and What is ¿thinking critically¿? How can I use critical thinking to get better grades in assessments? What is the role of critical thinking in the work place? These questions and more are explored in Thinking Critically About Law. Whether you have limited prior experience of critical thinking or are looking to improve your performance in assessments, this book is the ideal tool to help you enhance your capacity to question, challenge, reflect and problematize what you learn about the law throughout your studies and beyond.

Shana Connell Noyes, consultant to Julia Roberts and director Alan Pakula on the film The Pelican Brief, and Professor Henry S. Noyes

There is a saying about law school that they scare you to death the first year, work you to death the second, and bore you to death the third. Law students today have a pretty good idea what to expect from the initial plunge into the law. Scott Turow's One L, describing his first year at Harvard, has become almost mandatory reading for anyone contemplating law school. And because that level of intensity is what so many expect, that is how the first year usually plays out, complete with ulcers, outlines, and relentless work. But the education does not end after the first year. Law school is a three-year course of study, and the first year often bears little resemblance to the final two. Facing two more years of grueling class work, mounting student loans, increasing pressure to stand out from the crowd, and the never-ending search for the perfect job, upper-class students come to realize that surviving the fall into the deep end is no guarantee they will learn to swim. Letters from Law School is about the second year of law school, after the cold shock of the plunge. This book describes the struggle to come up for air.

Offers one hundred rules that every first year law student should live by ?Dear Law Student: Here?s the truth. You belong here.? Law professor Andrew Ferguson and former student Jonathan Yusef Newton open with this statement of reassurance in The Law of Law School. As all former law students and current lawyers can attest, law school is disorienting, overwhelming, and difficult. Unlike other educational institutions, law school is not set up simply to teach a subject. Instead, the first year of law school is set up to teach a skill set and way of thinking, which you then apply to do the work of lawyering. What most first-year students don?t realize is that law school has a code, an unwritten rulebook of decisions and traditions that must be understood in order to succeed. The Law of Law School endeavors to distill this common wisdom into one hundred easily digestible rules. From self-care tips such as ?Remove the Drama,? to studying tricks like ?Prepare for Class like an Appellate Argument,? topics on exams, classroom expectations, outlining, case briefing, professors, and mental health are all broken down into the rules that form the hidden law of law school. If you don?t have a network of lawyers in your family and are unsure of what to expect, Ferguson and Newton offer a forthright guide to navigating the expectations, challenges, and secrets to first-year success. Jonathan Newton was himself such a non-traditional student and now shares his story as a pathway to a meaningful and positive law school experience. This book is perfect for the soon-to-be law school student or the current 1L and speaks to the growing number of first-generation law students in America.

A concise, highly accessible guide to exam success. Provides an insider s view of what professors look for in exam answers, and how exam-taking connects to good lawyering. Accompanied by a Web site with content that is both free (e.g., sample outlines, class notes, case briefs) and for-sale (e.g., sample exams and memos written by professors giving feedback on the answers). Features: High-profile, experienced authors from elite schools with hands-on experience teaching the majority of the courses in the traditional 1L curriculum Distinctive central pedagogy: the pinball method of exam-taking Accompanied by Web site with content that is both free (e.g., sample outlines, class notes, case briefs) and for-sale (e.g., sample exams and memos written by professors giving feedback on the answers). Explains to students not just the how but the why of law school exams what makes law school exams different from exams students have encountered in other settings Detailed examples provide concrete demonstrations of exam-taking techniques Highly readable: prose is straightforward and humorous; key points accented with memorably amusing illustrations Not just an exam prep book; students are offered guidance on getting the most out of classes, and law school more generally

Law schools currently do an excellent job of helping students to 'think like a lawyer,' but empirical data show that clients, legal employers, and the legal system need students to develop a wider range of competencies. This book helps legal educators to understand these competencies and provides practical ways to build them into a law school curriculum. Based on recommendations from the American Bar Association, the American Association of Law Schools, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, it will equip students with the skills they need not only to think but to act and feel like a lawyer. With this proposed model, students will internalize the need for professional development toward excellence, their responsibility to others, a client-centered approach to problem solving, and strong well-being practices. These four goals constitute a lawyer's professional identity, and this book empowers legal educators to foster each student's development of a professional identity that leads to a gratifying career that serves society well. This title is Open Access.

This new edition of The Law School Book is essential reading for anyone beginning the study of law or for those considering application to law school. Professor Hutchinson explores both the theoretical foundations of the Canadian legal system and the practical demands on law students today with humour and perceptiveness. His aim is to "provide the reader with insights and tips on how to cope with the routines of law school life and succeed in becoming a good law student and an even better lawyer." As a basic orientation to the law the book is accessible, though-provoking and, at times, controversial. The Law School Book should be the first on the shelf of any aspiring lawyer.

As the ideal companion for law students, The Law Student's Pocket Mentor: From Surviving to Thriving guides students from the summer before starting law school straight through to their first clerking experience. It is a practical, step-by-step guide that uses exercises, worksheets, and checklists to help students identify their needs, plan strategies, and organize their efforts to maximize success in law school. This pocket companion offers all of the essentials students need for success: It is comprehensive in coverage: covers essential academic skills (e.g., reading and briefing cases, taking notes in class, outlining, writing exams) provides career preparation skills (e.g., building strong resumes, choosing classes) discusses emotional aspects of legal education (e.g., maintaining balance, dealing with grades) addresses special concerns of non-traditional students It is accessible in nature: approaches academic topics in a user-friendly, non-academic style gives a student-eye-view of typical challenges faced by law students, including letters from actual students, narratives, etc. presents skills in a logical, step-by-step manner accounts for and addresses various learning styles provides clear, how-to instructions regarding essential academic skills offers exercises to help students identify challenges, plan strategies, and recognize progress provides ample forms to show students how to best organize their time, brief cases, take class notes, and perform self-diagnoses on their exam answers It has been proven effective: all exercises, techniques, and forms have been student-tested and refined at William Mitchell College of Law An author website to support classroom instruction using this title is available at http://www.aspenlawschool.com/iijima

Law schools are failing both their staff and students by requiring them to prize reason and rationality and to suppress or ignore emotions. Despite innovations in terms of both content and teaching techniques, there is little evidence that emotions are effectively acknowledged or utilised within legal education. Instead law schools are clinging to an out-dated and erroneous perception of emotions as at best, irrational, and at worst dangerous. In contrast to this, educational and scientific developments have demonstrated that emotions are a fundamental, inescapable part of learning, teaching and skills development. Harnessing these emotions will therefore have a transformative effect on legal education and enable it to adapt to the needs and demands of the twenty-first century. This book provides a theoretical overview of the role played by emotions in all aspects of the life of the law school. It explores the relationship emotions have with key traditional and contemporary approaches to legal education, the ways in which emotions can be conceptualised, their interaction with the politics and policies of legal education and their role within teaching and learning. The book also considers the importance of emotional wellbeing for both law students and legal academics 　 Overall, this book argues for a more holistic form of legal education in which emotions play a valuable (and valued) role. This requires a new vision for law schools, in which emotions are acknowledged and embedded at all levels, institutional and personal.

Law Dissertations: A Step-by-Step Guide provides law students with all the guidance and information they need to complete and succeed in their LLB, LLM or law-related dissertation. Written in an accessible, clear format and with plenty of tools to help put the theory into practice, Laura Lammasniemi will show students how to make writing a law dissertation easy, without compromising intellectual rigour. The primary aim of this book is to tackle the issues that cause anxiety to law students undertaking a dissertation so that they can focus on the research that you find exciting. As well as explaining the process of research and outlining the various legal research approaches, the book also provides practical, step-by-step guidance on how to formulate a proposal, research plan, and literature review. The second edition expands guidance to LLM and Masters students, and provides up-to-date guidance on how to complete your project using both online resources and remotely. Unlike other law research skills books, Law Dissertations: A Step-by-Step Guide includes a section on empirical research methodology and ethics for the benefit of students who are studying for a Masters in law. Packed full of exercises, worked examples, and tools for self-evaluation, this book is sure to become an essential guide for law students, supporting them on every step of their dissertation journey.

Often law students don't achieve the results they are capable of, not because of a lack of intellectual ability, but because they haven't fully understood what is required of them and what they could and should do to achieve higher marks. Acing the LLB will help those students realise their full potential and achieve the very best marks. It explains what lecturers are looking for in a top class answer and is packed with easy-to-follow practical advice that students can use to improve their performance. The author draws upon his own experiences as a lecturer and marker of student work as well as those of colleagues at a range of institutions to offer sound and realistic advice. Engaging, accessible and very readable, this is an ideal guide for anyone starting out on an LLB or for current law students who are looking to improve their grades.

Anyone who has attended law school knows that it invokes an important intellectual transformation, frequently referred to as "learning to think like a lawyer". This process, which forces students to think and talk in radically new and different ways about conflicts, is directed by professors in the course of their lectures and examinations, and conducted via spoken and written language. Beth Mertz's book is the first study to truly delve into that language to reveal the complexitiesof how this process takes place.Mertz bases her linguistic study on tape recordings from her first year Contracts courses in eight different law schools. She knows how all these schools employ the Socratic method between teacher and student, forcing the student to shift away from moral and emotional terms in thinking about conflict, toward frameworks of legal authority instead. This move away from moral frameworks is key, she says, arguing that it represents an underlying world view at the corenot just of law educatiuon, butfor better or worse, of the entire US legal system - which, while providing a useful source of legitimacy and a means to process conflict, fails to deal systematically with aspects of fairness and social justice. The latter part of her study shows how differences in race and gender makeup among lawstudents and professors can subtly alter this process.Written within the tradition of anthropological lingustics, Mertz's work - the first to study law school in this sort of detail - will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers interested in the intersection of law, language, and society: sociolinguists; anthropologists; feminist, race, and social theorists, and law professors.

A Law Student's Guide is for the newly admitted and prospective law student. The Guide helps students prepare for and benefit from the law school curriculum. It also helps prospective law students evaluate whether they are interested in law school. The Guide follows the urging of the Carnegie Foundation report Educating Lawyers to make the law school curriculum more explicit and to better integrate the knowledge, skills, and ethics dimensions of legal education. The Guide not only offers short sections on a variety of important principles of legal education, sources of law, and justice systems, but also addresses legal analysis, law practice, and lawyer ethics. Each of the Guide's sections begins with bullet points listing the topics addressed and ends with a set of reflective questions anchoring the curriculum in the student's experience. Each section also ends by stating the curriculum aims and identifying the courses and opportunities that help students meet those aims. The Guide also offers famous-lawyer biographies, new-lawyer vignettes, practice vignettes, career advice, and lawyer wisdom.

In celebration of August 2023 blockbuster movies, CAP has released a selected reading from the book with a new introduction by the author, "Sh*t No One Tells GIRLS About Law School." Irreverent. Fun. Honest. Words never before used to describe a book intended for law students--until now. Sh*t No One Tells You About Law School offers law students a compilation of advice culled from the author's fifteen years of teaching experience. Think Jessica Pearson meets Carrie Bradshaw--shoe closet included! This book is a tell-it-like-it-is account of how students can successfully navigate the law school experience (minus the boring stuff). Written for today's law student, this book goes far beyond the run-of-the-mill "here's how you case brief" and "read cases carefully" advice. Expect to be both motivated and entertained by the author's practical, hands-on guidance. Professor Tanya Monestier is a tenured law professor who teaches Contracts, Sales, and Conflict of Laws. She was a first-generation student who kicked a** in law school and who wants to help you do the same.

In the Law School Survival Manual, Nancy Rapoport and Jeff Van Niel serve as the friendly voice of experience whose wit and wisdom will guide you through law school from the application process to orientation, and from your first year to graduation - including summer jobs, clerkships, and the bar exam. This concise handbook focuses on all aspects of law school that are mystifying or tricky or both. The Law School Survival Manual: From LSAT to Bar Exam offers complete coverage, Before law school What you'll need before you apply Picking the right law school for you Orientation Your checklist for law school First year Collegiality and etiquette Friendships, romance, and networking The psychology of law professors Reading cases and statutes Outlining and studying Preparing for essay and multiple-choice exams Choosing upper-level courses Managing your time and scheduling your life Exploring joint-degree program opportunities Finding and applying for a summer job Landing a judicial clerkship Studying for the bar exam and the MPRE With reassuring humor and unique perspectives, Nancy Rapoport and Jeff Van Niel show you how to cope with stress, manage your time, study efficiently, nurture new friendships, write a paper, prepare for exams, and make sound decisions - in law school and beyond.

The Mindful Law Student is an innovative guide to learning about mindfulness and integrating mindfulness practices into the law school experience. Through the use of metaphor, insight, mindfulness practices, and relaxation, and self-care exercises, students are reminded of the tools they have long carried with them to navigate the exciting and challenging environment of law school and the practice of law. Scott Rogers brings readers on a journey through the law school experience with seven hypothetical students who experience situations that make tangible the challenges, benefits, and promise of mindfulness. He provides real-world examples of applying mindfulness in law school using language of the law to impart mindfulness insights and practices. This novel guide is an approachable and valuable resource for any law student.

Expert Learning for Law Students is designed to help law students build the analytical skills necessary to succeed in law school, on the bar exam, and in law practice. This book reveals how successful law students and lawyers plan, monitor, and implement their work, and it provides detailed guidance regarding individual student personality types and learning styles. The accompanying workbook includes questions and exercises to assist students in practicing the concepts explained in the text. The second edition includes greater emphasis on students personalizing all strategy suggestions by adapting strategies to their individual learning styles, personality types, and, most importantly, their results and their evaluations of the causes of those results. It includes additional materials designed to help students deal with law school stress and offers insights for ameliorating that stress developed within the Humanizing Legal Education movement. Tips on time management and avoiding procrastination; a revised discussion on case reading reflecting recent research; a new section on using color as a memorization tool; and a revised discussion of how to apply rules to facts and how to apply and distinguish cases are also provided.

This book provides a novel contribution to the wider bodies of literature on student and academic wellbeing by including a series of rich and nuanced discussions of specific aspects of the wellbeing of legal academics. It contains original research contributions on this topic drawing on insights from law, education and psychology and throws a spotlight on an emerging field of interest. In particular, it focuses attention on the need to understand the implications of workload, communication, competence, and community for academic wellbeing with the collection providing insight as to the amelioration of stress linked to these themes. Reference will be made to the key factors which influence each of these themes, such as the neo-liberal academy, the contours and staffing of the law school, the impact of COVID-19 and the role of values and ethics. Relevant theoretical perspectives relating to these themes, including self-determination theory and the notion of an ethic of care, will also be discussed.