Law Outlines

A Good Law Outline is For Memorizing the Law.

A law student who has and knows how to use good law outlines will do significantly better than a student without law outlines. Sad to say most law students buy a law outline for the wrong reason(s) and then proceed to use it for all the wrong reasons. Law outlines and how to use them are essential to a full understanding of the law. Further you must understand that the main purpose of a law outline is to assist you in memorizing the law. Also, the process of taking a canned outline and then making your own custom law outline from it will assist you in the structural memorization of the law.

Canned Law outlines are extremely important because they cover the volumes of information that you are expected to know but are not covered in class because of time constraints.

The main purpose of class is to teach you the application of the law. Law classes are very similar to a chemistry lab. The cases are the experiments. The students and the professor apply rules of law to the facts presented and discuss the results to help the student achieve the ability to apply law to facts. You are expected to have already studied the applicable law and know it dead cold. You are in class to learn how to apply the law. You are not there to do a comprehensive review of the law on a particular subject. Thus relying on class discussions alone to create a good law outline is a serious mistake.

You Must Know the Law Before You Walk Into Class; Use Hornbooks or Get a Good Commercial (canned)Law Outline

All the law that you are supposed to know before going into class is usually contained in Hornbooks on the subject. Hornbooks are many thousands of pages of text. They are difficult to read because they contain so many case quotes and use the legal talk that mostly no one but professors of the law use. Legal talk is easy to understand if you understand the concept behind the words used. Legal talk is impossible to understand if you do not understand the particular concept behind the phrases used.

A good law outline explains the concepts of legal talk in easy to understand English and a good law outline can relate the concepts to the words used in legal talk. This allows for a faster learning process with less confusion.

You need to memorize the law. Hornbooks are very useful in helping you with areas of the law that present special problems for you, but they are useless as a tool for memorizing the law. A good law outline can be of enormous help in memorizing the law and in learning the application of the law. Some are formatted to allow you to memorize the information efficiently.

A law outline makes Memorizing the Law Less Difficult.

Your actual law outline selection process is usually dictated by choice and by your own personal understanding of the law. However, a few general rules do apply. Most students select law outlines to help them do better in classroom sessions. This is a mistake. You need to use a law outline to help you memorize the law so you will do well on the exams you are given. If you have classroom anxiety, buy a case brief book or product.

Professors, law students, and legal authors will tell you to make your own law outline from the material covered in class. This is a fatal error because classes are not a general law review. If you rely on class materials alone to make your law outline , you will only have a small snapshot of the law that you need to know to do well on law school and bar exams. Most classes and courses only cover about 60% of the law you need to know and are expected to know. Therefore a good commercial law outline will supply the additional law that was not covered in class.

What the professors and other law students should really say is get a law outlinethat you can easily customize to cover the extra areas that your professor fails to cover.

A Good law outline Covers all the Law and is Not 800 Pages

A good law outline should contain most of the law covered by the hornbooks on the subject. That law outline should take that law and distill it into easily understood definitions and present it in manner that is easy to memorize.

Most important is to get a law outline that is on computer so you don’t have to waste a lot of time retyping or adding information. A custom law outline is the goal but you really want to spend most of your time memorizing the law outlineand not in creating the law outline. So modification of a digital law outline into a custom one is the way to save the most time.

Once you have decided on a law outline it is best to customize the information in a format that you like and is easy for you to memorize.

We like the base advice we learned about using law outlines and creating them from the How to Get A’s in Law School. You can see that material reviewed by clicking on Exam Writing on the site header.

Also Check Outline of Laws and Foldeez ™ Law Outlines