For Incoming Students
Some great books are available to help you hit the ground running in law school. Titles include Foundation Press’ Law School Without Fear and the Blond’s series of ‘pocket’ outlines and many others. Entering first year students are encouraged to take advantage of the tutoring provided by these and other books. Find them using search words like Student and School. They will help you read, analyze and brief cases, budget study time, select among study aids, decide whether to join a study group, and learn the fine art of writing law school (and later, Bar exam) essays. All of these titles make great summer reading in preparation for the excitement and challenge of your first law school semester.

Some law schools require or recommend that you purchase hornbooks in addition to your casebooks. Hornbooks are scholarly treatises on areas of the law such as Contracts by Farnsworth. If you purchase a hornbook, you may find that your professor doesn’t actually assign reading in it. That’s because you’re expected to open your hornbooks on your own. If you’ve just finished a line of cases about offer and acceptance, look in the index of your Contracts hornbook to find the sections dealing with offer and acceptance. Read these sections to complement the knowledge you gained from reading the cases in your casebook and participating in the classroom discussions.

You see, most law study is by the Socratic method, which is basically reading cases and answering your professors’ probing questions. Hornbooks and other law school study aids present the information in a more direct way. So different people who have different study styles can learn more efficiently by exposing themselves to the same material presented in different ways. For this reason, no one should buy a given brand of outline just because another student said "Get only Emanuel’s" or "Gilbert’s is the best." All of the study aids are worthwhile, but you need to purchase the ones that complement your particular learning style.

Continuing Students
What lies ahead? A couple of hard courses, a bunch of easy ones, and the opportunity to practice your skills in a clerkship, where you may experience the law by working for a judge while learning the operation of the court from the inside. Following are some suggestions.

Read a Blond’s or similar text before starting Property and Con Law. These are challenging courses and you will do well to have a head start. Property is largely theoretical, so be prepared for abstract cases and discussion about which finder gets to be the keeper and whether the hunter who saw the fox first gets to keep it even if another hunter actually bags the animal. Only later in the semester will Property begin to cover contemporary issues such as the recording of real estate deeds.

The great thing about Con Law is that every case in your casebook was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which means that there is a law review article that explains every one of them. You may encounter a case in your casebook that simply doesn't make sense. That's probably because it was hastily edited and an important part of the case never made it into your book. By reading a law review commentary about that case, you may be the only one in class who understands it. Let your professor call on you that day and her/she might regard you as an up and coming ConLaw scholar!

Please send comments, questions and article proposals to information@smartpros.com.