typical law school assignments

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Being a student always means having to deal with loads of homework. This statement is true for all students, regardless of their academic level or the major they choose to study. However, while the scope of homework is about the same for everyone, the types of assignments can slightly vary depending on the subject that you study.

In this article, we are going to tell you about the four main homework types facing law students, in particular. So, if you are a law student yourself, read on to learn what will be expected of you in a law school. 

Practice Homework

The first and the most common of the four main homework types is practice homework. The core goal of such assignments is to help students expand their knowledge and reinforce their newly-acquired skills by means of putting them to practice. This kind of homework is the one that makes the most of the academic program, which is why law students struggle with it the most.

The most common assignment that represents this type of homework is essay writing. Just like the rest of their peers, law students are being assigned dozens of essays and other academic papers every year. A load of such assignments is so huge that students often look for the write my essay online writing services and platforms. But, it is an integral part of the educational process, so there is no way to avoid academic writing.

Some other examples of practice homework that you can face in a law school can include:

• Memorizing local laws;
• Reading court records;
• Examining subject-related literature, etc.

Extension Homework

The second one of the four main homework types is extension homework. In a nutshell, this type of homework is used by professors to encourage their students to pursue knowledge individually and in ways that are more imaginative than simply reading a textbook. Also, extension assignments are used to help students connect what they learn in the classroom with real-life and apply their existing skills to expand their knowledge.

Common types of law assignments that represent this type of homework include:

• Writing literature reviews;
• Researching local law news;
• Compare and contrast events, etc.

Creative Homework

Despite the fact that law students spend most of their time studying complex and serious subjects, there is still a place for the next type of homework – creative homework in their curriculums. As you can guess from its name, this type of homework often takes different creative forms. The key goal is to help students develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills through completing creative projects.

There are plenty of examples of creative homework assignments that you can face in a law school. Basically, pretty much any type of individual project can be considered a creative homework assignment. However, to help you grasp the idea, here are a few examples of the most common law assignments of this type:

• Research projects;
• Photo essays;
• PowerPoint presentations, etc.

Preparatory Homework

Finally, the last of the four types of homework is preparatory homework. The key goal of such homework is to help students gain solid background on a specific unit of study in order to prepare them for future lessons. Simply put, preparatory homework is the type of homework that helps you collect initial knowledge on the subject you are studying. And it can also be called one of the most common types of assignments facing law and other students.

What assignments can be considered as preparatory homework? In fact, there are many. To name a few, here are some of the most common examples of this type of homework:

• Tests and exams;
• Completing exercises from the workbook;
• Reading textbook chapters to prepare for the next lesson, test, discussion, etc.

The Bottom Line

Whether you are just planning to enroll in a law school or are already a law student, knowing about different types of homework that you will have to deal with can empower you for better academic achievements.

After reading this article, you should have a better idea of different homework types that you can face studying in a law school. Hopefully, this will help you prepare for your academic path and ensure success.

Camilla Uppal

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Sample 1L Study Schedule

By Laura Temme, Esq. | Legally reviewed by Steven J. Ellison, Esq. | Last reviewed November 03, 2022

Legally Reviewed

This article has been written and reviewed for legal accuracy, clarity, and style by  FindLaw’s team of legal writers and attorneys  and in accordance with  our editorial standards .

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Law school is well-known for the grueling schedule it imposes on its students. From the hundreds of pages per week in reading to the endless pressure of preparing outlines, the first year of law school can feel like being hit with a ton of bricks.

However, creating and maintaining a 1L study schedule can help students stay on top of the massive amount of work. A schedule to manage your time is not only crucial to success as a law student, but also to continued success as a lawyer.

Keeping Up With Reading

Staying on top of each class's syllabus is key to law school success. Almost every instructor breaks down their semester with a detailed syllabus that directs students to which cases to read and brief for each day of class. And while it's possible to succeed without briefing a single case, the majority of successful law students carve out specific times each day to keep up with their assigned reading.

Setting aside two hours for each hour a class meets should provide most students with more than enough time to read and brief the assigned cases.

For example, if your criminal law class meets three times a week for an hour each class, then set aside six hours throughout the week to focus just those readings. Don't worry - you don't need to read criminal law cases for six hours straight. Scatter your reading in one- or two-hour blocks throughout the week.

It also helps to think about when you are at your most productive. Are you a morning person? A night owl? Create a schedule based on when you are at your most alert and able to absorb the material you're studying.

Outline As You Go

With the abundance of reading that 1Ls face, the extra task of outlining for each class can sound daunting. In fact, piecing together class  outlines  are usually the last thing 1Ls want to do after finally putting that casebook down. However, outlines are by far the most essential element of a 1L study schedule.

Dedicating one hour a week per class to outlining can save you stress in the long run.

Many people wait to start their outlines until the last few weeks of the semester. However, taking time each week to consolidate and streamline your notes can help you remember important information without having to cram - and identify any sticking points where you need clarification.

Don't Forget Practice Essays

Practice exams  help you learn and internalize the law. By reading fact patterns on practice exams, you become accustomed to issue spotting, highlighting important facts, and noticing trends in the professor's tests.

You can even learn a lot by simply "failing" a practice essay and learning from your mistakes.

Scheduling practice essays for an hour a week for each class will help you understand the law to a greater degree than solely reading your case book. At the very least, it will teach how to properly take a law school exam.

Make Time for Yourself, Too

Law school definitely takes a toll on your mind and body. Remembering to allow time to eat and sleep into your schedule is necessary to keep your brain and body nourished so that you can continue to push through this undeniably difficult journey. Exercise can help get your system fired up before your grueling day starts and is also a known  stress reliever . Spending time with family, friends, and pets relieves stress and gives your brain a break from the legalese.

Staying on Track

Success in law school requires dedication, endurance, and perseverance. By creating a 1L study schedule and sticking to it, you can set yourself up for continued success during your first year and beyond. The image below is a good example of how a 1L might divide their study time (and includes breaks!) You can also take advantage of technology to help you stay on top of your coursework. Learn more about what to expect from law school and the bar exam through  FindLaw for law students . 

Sample 1L Study Schedule Full Text

The graphic above, titled "Sample 1L Study Schedule," uses gray text on a white background. It has grey and orange boxes and includes columns for all seven days of the week and rows broken down by hour from 6 a.m. to 12 a.m.

In the "Monday" column, the schedule shows:

• Criminal Law lecture from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
• Contracts lecture from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.
• Time dedicated to outlining from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.
• A break from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m.
• Reading time for Torts from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
• Reading time for Civil Procedure from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
• A break from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
• Reading time for Contracts from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.
• Open time from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m.

In the "Tuesday" column, the schedule shows:

• Reading for Contracts from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
• Reading for Criminal Law 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
• Torts lecture from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
• Civil Procedure lecture from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
• Study Group from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.

In the "Wednesday" column, the schedule shows:

• Reading time for Criminal Law from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.

In the "Thursday" column, the schedule shows:

• Reading for Criminal Law from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
• Reading for Contracts 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.

In the "Friday" column, the schedule shows:

• Contracts Lecture from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.
• Time dedicated to outlining from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• A break for the remainder of the day

The "Saturday" column is open time.

In the "Sunday" column, the schedule shows:

• Reading for Criminal Law from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
• Reading for Contracts from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
• Free time for the remainder of the day

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Prof. Pamela Newell

How to write a case brief for law school: Excerpt reproduced from Introduction to the Study of Law: Cases and Materials,

Third Edition (LexisNexis 2009) by Michael Makdisi & John Makdisi

C. HOW TO BRIEF

The previous section described the parts of a case in order to make it easier to read and identify the pertinent information that you will use to create your briefs. This section will describe the parts of a brief in order to give you an idea about what a brief is, what is helpful to include in a brief, and what purpose it serves. Case briefs are a necessary study aid in law school that helps to encapsulate and analyze the mountainous mass of material that law students must digest. The case brief represents a final product after reading a case, rereading it, taking it apart, and putting it back together again. In addition to its function as a tool for self-instruction and referencing, the case brief also provides a valuable “cheat sheet” for class participation.

Who will read your brief? Most professors will espouse the value of briefing but will never ask to see that you have, in fact, briefed. As a practicing lawyer, your client doesn’t care if you brief, so long as you win the case. The judges certainly don’t care if you brief, so long as you competently practice the law. You are the person that the brief will serve! Keep this in mind when deciding what elements to include as part of your brief and when deciding what information to include under those elements.

What are the elements of a brief? Different people will tell you to include different things in your brief. Most likely, upon entering law school, this will happen with one or more of your instructors. While opinions may vary, four elements that are essential to any useful brief are the following:

(a) Facts (name of the case and its parties, what happened factually and procedurally, and the judgment)

(b) Issues (what is in dispute)

(c) Holding (the applied rule of law)

(d) Rationale (reasons for the holding)

If you include nothing but these four elements, you should have everything you need in order to recall effectively the information from the case during class or several months later when studying for exams.

Because briefs are made for yourself, you may want to include other elements that expand the four elements listed above. Depending on the case, the inclusion of additional elements may be useful. For example, a case that has a long and important section expounding dicta might call for a separate section in your brief labeled: Dicta. Whatever elements you decide to include, however, remember that the brief is a tool intended for personal use. To the extent that more elements will help with organization and use of the brief, include them. On the other hand, if you find that having more elements makes your brief cumbersome and hard to use, cut back on the number of elements. At a minimum, however, make sure you include the four elements listed above.

Elements that you may want to consider including in addition to the four basic elements are:

(e) Dicta (commentary about the decision that was not the basis for the decision)

(f) Dissent (if a valuable dissenting opinion exits, the dissent’s opinion)

(g) Party’s Arguments (each party’s opposing argument concerning the ultimate issue)

(h) Comments (personal commentary)

Personal comments can be useful if you have a thought that does not fit elsewhere. In the personal experience of one of the authors, this element was used to label cases as specific kinds (e.g., as a case of vicarious liability) or make mental notes about what he found peculiar or puzzling about cases. This element allowed him to release his thoughts (without losing them) so that he could move on to other cases.

In addition to these elements, it may help you to organize your thoughts, as some people do, by dividing Facts into separate elements:

(1) Facts of the case (what actually happened, the controversy)

(2) Procedural History (what events within the court system led to the present case)

(3) Judgment (what the court actually decided)

Procedural History is usually minimal and most of the time irrelevant to the ultimate importance of a case; however, this is not always true. One subject in which Procedure History is virtually always relevant is Civil Procedure.

When describing the Judgment of the case, distinguish it from the Holding. The Judgment is the factual determination by the court, in favor of one party, such as “affirmed,” “reversed,” or “remanded.” In contrast, the Holding is the applied rule of law that serves as the basis for the ultimate judgment.

Remember that the purpose of a brief is to remind you of the important details that make the case significant in terms of the law. It will be a reference tool when you are drilled by a professor and will be a study aid when you prepare for exams. A brief is also like a puzzle piece.

The elements of the brief create the unique shape and colors of the piece, and, when combined with other pieces, the picture of the common law takes form. A well-constructed brief will save you lots of time by removing the need to return to the case to remember the important details and also by making it easier to put together the pieces of the common law puzzle.

D. EXTRACTING THE RELEVANT INFORMATION: ANNOTATING AND HIGHLIGHTING

So now that you know the basic elements of a brief, what information is important to include under each element? The simple answer is: whatever is relevant. But what parts of a case are relevant? When you read your first few cases, you may think that everything that the judge said was relevant to his ultimate conclusion. Even if this were true, what is relevant for the judge to make his decision is not always relevant for you to include in your brief. Remember, the reason to make a brief is not to persuade the world that the ultimate decision in the case is a sound one, but rather to aid in refreshing your memory concerning the most important parts of the case.

What facts are relevant to include in a brief? You should include the facts that are necessary to remind you of the story. If you forget the story, you will not remember how the law in the case was applied. You should also include the facts that are dispositive to the decision in the case. For instance, if the fact that a car is white is a determining factor in the case, the brief should note that the case involves a white car and not simply a car. To the extent that the procedural history either helps you to remember the case or plays an important role in the ultimate outcome, you should include these facts as well.

What issues and conclusions are relevant to include in a brief? There is usually one main issue on which the court rests its decision. This may seem simple, but the court may talk about multiple issues, and may discuss multiple arguments from both sides of the case. Be sure to distinguish the issues from the arguments made by the parties. The relevant issue or issues, and corresponding conclusions, are the ones for which the court made a final decision and which are binding. The court may discuss intermediate conclusions or issues, but stay focused on the main issue and conclusion which binds future courts.

What rationale is important to include in a brief? This is probably the most difficult aspect of the case to determine. Remember that everything that is discussed may have been relevant to the judge, but it is not necessarily relevant to the rationale of the decision. The goal is to remind yourself of the basic reasoning that the court used to come to its decision and the key factors that made the decision favor one side or the other.

A brief should be brief! Overly long or cumbersome briefs are not very helpful because you will not be able to skim them easily when you review your notes or when the professor drills you. On the other hand, a brief that is too short will be equally unhelpful because it lacks sufficient information to refresh your memory. Try to keep your briefs to one page in length. This will make it easy for you to organize and reference them.

Do not get discouraged. Learning to brief and figuring out exactly what to include will take time and practice. The more you brief, the easier it will become to extract the relevant information.

While a brief is an extremely helpful and important study aid, annotating and highlighting are other tools for breaking down the mass of material in your casebook. The remainder of this section will discuss these different techniques and show how they complement and enhance the briefing process.

Annotating Cases

Many of you probably already read with a pencil or pen, but if you do not, now is the time to get in the habit. Cases are so dense and full of information that you will find yourself spending considerable amounts of time rereading cases to find what you need. An effective way to reduce this time is to annotate the margins of the casebook. Your pencil (or pen) will be one of your best friends while reading a case. It will allow you to mark off the different sections (such as facts, procedural history, or conclusions), thus allowing you to clear your mind of thoughts and providing an invaluable resource when briefing and reviewing.

You might be wondering why annotating is important if you make an adequate, well-constructed brief. By their very nature briefs cannot cover everything in a case. Even with a thorough, well-constructed brief you may want to reference the original case in order to reread dicta that might not have seemed important at the time, to review the complete procedural history or set of facts, or to scour the rationale for a better understanding of the case; annotating makes these tasks easier. Whether you return to a case after a few hours or a few months, annotations will swiftly guide you to the pertinent parts of the case by providing a roadmap of the important sections. Your textual markings and margin notes will refresh your memory and restore specific thoughts you might have had about either the case in general or an individual passage.

Annotations will also remind you of forgotten thoughts and random ideas by providing a medium for personal comments.

In addition to making it easier to review an original case, annotating cases during the first review of a case makes the briefing process easier. With adequate annotations, the important details needed for your brief will be much easier to retrieve. Without annotations, you will likely have difficulty locating the information you seek even in the short cases. It might seem strange that it would be hard to reference a short case, but even a short case will likely take you at least fifteen to twenty-five minutes to read, while longer cases may take as much as thirty minutes to an hour to complete. No matter how long it takes, the dense material of all cases makes it difficult to remember all your thoughts, and trying to locate specific sections of the analysis may feel like you are trying to locate a needle in a haystack. An annotation in the margin, however, will not only swiftly guide you to a pertinent section, but will also refresh the thoughts that you had while reading that section.

When you read a case for the first time, read for the story and for a basic understanding of the dispute, the issues, the rationale, and the decision. As you hit these elements (or what you think are these elements) make a mark in the margins. Your markings can be as simple as “facts” (with a bracket that indicates the relevant part of the paragraph). When you spot an issue, you may simply mark “issue” or instead provide a synopsis in your own words. When a case sparks an idea — write that idea in the margin as well — you never know when a seemingly irrelevant idea might turn into something more.

Finally, when you spot a particularly important part of the text, underline it (or highlight it as described below).

With a basic understanding of the case, and with annotations in the margin, the second read-through of the case should be much easier. You can direct your reading to the most important sections and will have an easier time identifying what is and is not important. Continue rereading the case until you have identified all the relevant information that you need to make your brief, including the issue(s), the facts, the holding, and the relevant parts of the analysis.

Pencil or pen — which is better to use when annotating? Our recommendation is a mechanical pencil. Mechanical pencils make finer markings than regular pencils, and also than ballpoint pens. Although you might think a pencil might smear more than a pen, with its sharp point a mechanical pencil uses very little excess lead and will not smear as much as you might imagine. A mechanical pencil will also give you the freedom to make mistakes without consequences. When you first start annotating, you may think that some passages are more important than they really are, and therefore you may resist the urge to make a mark in order to preserve your book and prevent false guideposts. With a pencil, however, the ability to erase and rewrite removes this problem.

Highlighting

Why highlight? Like annotating, highlighting may seem unimportant if you create thorough, well-constructed briefs, but highlighting directly helps you to brief. It makes cases, especially the more complicated ones, easy to digest, review and use to extract information.

Highlighting takes advantage of colors to provide a uniquely effective method for reviewing and referencing a case. If you prefer a visual approach to learning, you may find highlighting to be a very effective tool.

If annotating and highlighting are so effective, why brief? Because the process of summarizing a case and putting it into your own words within a brief provides an understanding of the law and of the case that you cannot gain through the process of highlighting or annotating.

The process of putting the case into your own words forces you to digest the material, while annotating and highlighting can be accomplished in a much more passive manner.

What should you highlight? Similar to annotating, the best parts of the case to highlight are those that represent the needed information for your brief such as the facts, the issue, the holding and the rationale.

Unlike annotating, highlighting provides an effective way to color code, which makes referring to the case even easier. In addition, Highlighters are particularly useful in marking off entire sections by using brackets. These brackets will allow you to color-code the case without highlighting all the text, leaving the most important phrases untouched for a more detailed highlight marking or underlining.

Highlighting is a personal tool, and therefore should be used to the extent that highlighting helps, but should be modified in a way that makes it personally time efficient and beneficial. For instance, you might combine the use of annotations in the margins with the visual benefit of highlighting the relevant text. You may prefer to underline the relevant text with a pencil, but to use a highlighter to bracket off the different sections of a case. Whatever you choose to do, make sure that it works for you, regardless of what others recommend. The techniques in the remainder of this section will describe ways to make full use of your highlighters.

First, buy yourself a set of multi-colored highlighters, with at least four, or perhaps five or six different colors. Yellow, pink, and orange are usually the brightest. Depending on the brand, purple and green can be dark, but still work well. Although blue is a beautiful color, it tends to darken and hide the text.

Therefore we recommend that you save blue for the elements that you rarely highlight.

For each different section of the case, choose a color, and use that color only when highlighting the section of the case designated for that color. Consider using yellow for the text that you tend to highlight most frequently. Because yellow is the brightest, you may be inclined to use yellow for the Conclusions in order to make them stand out the most. If you do this, however, you will exhaust your other colors much faster than yellow and this will require that you purchase an entire set of new highlighters when a single color runs out because colors such as green are not sold separately. If instead you choose to use yellow on a more frequently highlighted section such as the Analysis, when it comes time to replace your yellow marker, you will need only to replace your yellow highlighter individually. In the personal experience on one of the authors, the sections of cases that seemed to demand the most highlighter attention were the

Facts and the Analysis, while the Issues and Holdings demanded the least. Other Considerations and

Procedural History required lots of highlighting in particular cases although not in every case.

Experiment if you must, but try to choose a color scheme early on in the semester and stick with it. That way, when you come back to the first cases of the semester, you will not be confused with multiple color schemes. The basic sections of a case for which you should consider giving a different color are:

(b) Procedural History

(c) Issue (and questions presented)

(d) Holding (and conclusions)

(e) Analysis (rationale)

(f) Other Considerations (such as dicta)

Not all of these sections demand a separate color. You may find that combining Facts and Procedural History or Issues and Holdings works best. Furthermore, as mentioned above, some sections may not warrant highlighting in every case (e.g., dicta probably do not need to be highlighted unless they are particularly important). If you decide that a single color is all that you need, then stick to one, but if you find yourself highlighting lots of text from many different sections, reconsider the use of at least a few different colors. Highlighters make text stand out, but only when used appropriately. The use of many colors enables you to highlight more text without reducing the highlighter’s effectiveness. Three to four colors provides decent color variation without the cumbersomeness of handling too many markers.

Once you are comfortable with your color scheme, determining exactly what to highlight still may be difficult. Similar to knowing what to annotate, experience will perfect your highlighting skills. Be careful not to highlight everything, thus ruining your highlighters’ effectiveness; at the same time, do not be afraid to make mistakes.

Now that we have covered the basics of reading, annotating, highlighting, and briefing a case, you are ready to start practicing. Keep the tips and techniques mentioned in this chapter in mind when you tackle the four topics in the remainder of this book. If you have difficultly, refer back to this chapter to help guide you as you master the case method of study and the art of using the common law.

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Five Tips for a Great Legal Writing Assignment

September 25, 2012 By Lee Burgess 2 Comments

• Follow the format outlined by your professor. It is likely your legal writing professor has given you instructions for the overall format of your legal writing assignment. In addition, your professor may have given you formatting instructions for the body of your assignment, such as that you need to follow IRAC. Whatever the instructions, follow them . Sure, you may think it is an overly formal or a frustrating way to write—but to be honest, no one cares. You need to write for your professor . It is more important to write in the way your professor has outlined, than as you personally prefer. And it is not going to be the last time your writing will need to conform to someone else’s rules. As a working attorney you often need to write in the format requested by your boss or even by the court. So get used to it!
• Remember, your writing doesn’t need to be full of legalese—the best legal writing is often simple! So many law students make the mistake of thinking that to “sound like a lawyer” they must use every possible legal term out there. This is just not the case. Often the most effective legal writing is very clear and concise and only uses legal terms or “legalese” when appropriate (say, when you are using a term of art). It is also important to work on writing in a clear, concise way because your assignments may have maximum word count. So using extra words to sound “more professional” won’t really help your grade in the end.
• Answer the question asked by your assignment. Often students get so caught up in writing their assignment that they forget to focus on the question that was asked of them. It is important to read and re-read (and even read again) the assignment sheet. You don’t want to make a mistake and write something off topic. Remember, answering the question is key to getting a good grade!
• Plan before you write. A great legal writing assignment is organized. And for most of us this means that you need to plan your paper just as you would plan an essay or any other project. Organization is key and it takes time to sit with the research and develop your answer. Make sure you build this time into your plan of how you are going to get your assignment done.
• Proofread and double-check citations. As an attorney-in-training, it is very important to present yourself in a professional way. That means that you need to proofread your assignments to present yourself in a professional way to your professor as well. If your assignment is riddled with typos, it is distracting for the professor and likely will cause your grade to drop. Also, students often are lax when handling citations. You are typically graded on the accuracy of your citations. Citations are not hard, but you must be detail oriented and look things up! I have seen many a legal writing grade go down because students didn’t spend adequate time or energy on citations. Don’t let this happen to you.

Legal writing, like most things, gets easier the more that you do it. So do every practice assignment assigned and get as much feedback as you can. This will help you become an excellent legal writer, which is a critical skill in our profession.

Check out these other helpful posts:

• Surviving the first weeks of law school .
• Law school exam prep 101 .
• Getting feedback on past exams is critical .
• Pay attention in class, it can save you time !

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About Lee Burgess

Lee Burgess, Esq. is the co-founder of the Law School Toolbox , a resource for law students that demystifies the law school experience and the Bar Exam Toolbox , a resource for students getting ready for the bar exam. Lee has been adjunct faculty at two bay area law schools teaching classes on law school and bar exam preparation. You can find Lee on Twitter at @leefburgess , @lawschooltools , & @barexamtools .

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Thank very much for the tips i have just read they been beneficial to me because am a distance law school student.

I need more guide to legal writing because am lecturing this course for Magistrates

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Writing Papers in Law School

Writing assignments are useful tools for challenging students to put complex thoughts into understandable language. The amount of writing required in law school can vary across courses, years, and schools. Students also sometimes have different reactions to their writing experiences. Here, we estimate how many pages students wrote during the 2019-2020 school year and show how the number of pages written is related to perceived gains in writing abilities.

Law students report on their writing assignments with three LSSSE questions:

Universal Background Checks: This would require a background check for all individuals seeking to purchase firearms, regardless of the source of the firearm. This would help to keep guns out of the hands of individuals argumentative essay on gun control with a criminal history or history of mental illness.

Shorter papers (fewer than five pages in length) are quite common law school. Only 16% of respondents did not write any short papers. Most students (59%) wrote between one and six short papers, although 15% of students wrote ten or more.

Medium-length papers (5-19 pages) are another staple of law school. Slightly more than half of law students (52%) wrote one to three papers of this length during the previous school year, and another quarter (27%) wrote four to six papers of this length. Only 10% of students did not write a medium-length paper in the previous year.

Long papers (20+ pages) are somewhat less common. About 31% of students did not write any long papers during the previous school year, although more than half of students (58%) wrote between one and three long papers.

We can also use information from these three writing questions to create a very rough estimate of the total number of pages each student wrote for class assignments over the past year. Law students tended to write between 26 and 100 pages total. This range accounts for about 60% of law students. Over a quarter (27%) of law students fell specifically into the 51-75 page range. But nearly one in five law students (19%) wrote over 125 pages in the previous school year.

Part of the purpose of writing assignments is to assess how students are assimilating and analyzing information. Another purpose is to enhance students’ writing abilities. In a separate section of the survey, LSSSE asks about the degree to which law school has contributed to the development of the student’s writing ability. Interestingly, when we correlate students’ responses to this question with the number of pages of writing they did over the course of the year, we see a gradual increase that plateaus at around 76-100 pages. That is, in general, students who write more pages of text believe that law school has helped them become better writers but only to a certain point. Beyond about a hundred pages of writing (combined across all their classes), students are not more likely to say that their experience at law school has contributed to their ability to write clearly and effectively.

Law school provides consistent opportunities for students to hone their writing and reasoning skills. Most law students write a handful of short- and medium-length papers each year. Students generally feel that law school contributes to their ability to write clearly and effectively, including those students who only wrote 25 or fewer pages in the previous year. However, students who wrote more (up to around 100 pages) tend to respond more favorably to the writing skill development question than students who wrote less.

Writing a law school research paper or law review note

• Books and articles

Basics of Format & Content

Research papers are not as strictly structured as legal memos, briefs, and other documents that you've learned about in legal writing and drafting courses. For example, there is no prescribed content/format similar to to the Questions Presented, Brief Answers, etc. that you learned for a legal memo.

A general approach to thinking about the content of a research paper is:

• Introduction in which you give some background and a clear statement of your thesis
• Status quo -- what is the existing law and why is it a problem
• Proposals for change

See this blog post by Jonathan Burns , an IU McKinney alum, for more on basic content.

If you're writing for a law review or seminar, you should get formatting instructions regarding things like margins, font size, line spacing. If you don't, or if you're doing an independent study, here are some basic guidelines to follow:

• Times New Roman or similar, 12 pt font.
• Double spaced lines.
• One inch margins all around.
• Footnotes in academic Bluebook style (use the rules on the main white pages instead of the light blue pages at the front of the Bluebook).
• Footnotes in same font as text, 10 pt font.
• Use Roman numerals and/or letters on headings and subheadings or style the fonts so that the difference between headings and subheadings is clear.   
• Page numbers in the footer, preferably centered, especially on first page. You could do bottom center on first page and then upper right in the header thereafter. Use the header and footer functions for this. If you don't know how to use headers and footers in Word, here is help:  https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/word2016/headers-and-footers/1/ . 

Headings and subheadings

Research papers should have headings and subheadings. These help your reader follow your logic--and a logical structure is very important. Headings and subheadings can also help you keep your thoughts organized. Just don't overuse them--you don't want every paragaph to have a subheading. 

Road map paragraph

Often, research papers will also include a paragraph at the end of the introduction that narrates the road map the paper will follow.   Here is an example of this kind of paragraph:

"The section that follows [this introduction] sets the stage by recounting two scenarios from the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, with discussion of the knowledge and implementation of accessibility features in online instructional materials. The next section provides an overview of various impairments and their effects on a user's experience of the online environment. Next is a review of the laws relevant to accessibility with attention to their potential application to online instruction, along with standards used to guide accessibility compliance. The article then explores the concept of universal design and its guiding principles, followed by a discussion of how to use the universal design principles to organize and better understand accessibility standards and practices. The final section briefly summarizes the discussion and encourages law librarians and professors to become knowledgeable and skilled in universal design for online materials to benefit all their students."

Table of Contents

A table of contents can also be helpful, though it's not necessary. If you add a table of contents to your papers, put it right at the beginning, before the introduction. Here's part of the table of contents for the same paper the paragraph above was taken from--it really just lays out the heading and subheadings with page numbers: 

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Law School Essay Prompts: What to Expect

Law school essay prompts are questions, instructions, or statements to which an applicant must respond in their admissions essays. These prompts indicate which direction your law school personal statement , law school letter of intent , law school diversity statement , or law school optional essay should take. Some form of essay is required as part of the application package in virtually all law schools. A well-formulated response to the prompt can make your application stand out and help you get into your chosen law school. In this blog, we’ll look at the different types of essays, their essential features, and common themes for prompts. We’ll also see some examples of how one applicant created and adapted their essay to respond to different requirements.

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Article Contents 18 min read

What is a law school essay prompt.

As you likely already know, law schools require the submission of an essay with your application. Law school admissions statistics may be daunting but rest assured that a well-prepared essay can significantly influence your chances! A writing prompt is the suggested question to answer in your essay. In researching law school application requirements, you will notice that they often provide similar prompts; however, it is important not to assume that all law schools will use a standard structure. For example, Stanford Law School asks for a proposal and explanation of three pieces of music that could be playing while the admissions committee reviews the student’s application.

What is the Purpose of Law School Essays?

Regardless of the prompt structure, these essays share certain features. Importantly, they are intended to complete your application package. In these essays, the admissions committee is seeking information that will round out and complement your application, not repeat what they already know based on your academic record, LSAT score, or other supporting documents you were required to submit. For example, if the law school’s application required that you detail any employment or volunteer positions you have occupied, it would not make sense to focus your essay on those experiences, as they have already been covered. Rather, you should seek to balance what the prompt suggests with what is missing from your application that you think the admissions committee should know.

These essays also serve the important purpose of demonstrating your writing skills. As the field of law requires strong and persuasive writing, the application essay is one of the first and essential ways to showcase your skills. Think of the last time you read a book or an article that truly impressed you. Did the author’s name stick with you? Were you tempted to read more by that author or find out more about them? In addition to improving your admission chances, a well-crafted application essay is an early opportunity to stand out or “make a name for yourself” at your chosen law school. Take advantage of it!

The key point is to answer the prompt; otherwise, your essay will be dismissed. In so doing, use all the tools at your disposal to ensure that your writing:

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It is essential to note and respect the formatting requirements of each school you apply to. A basic guideline is to provide the most significant information in as concise a form as possible , but details may vary. If the essay requirements for a particular law school seem vague, first, ensure that you are consulting the full requirements page or document. For example, some requirements may be posted as a summary on a web page to introduce the overall process, while the full list of specifications is detailed elsewhere on the law school\u2019s website or in a PDF or other form. Don\u2019t assume that brief requirements are the only requirements. When in doubt, contact the admissions office to clarify the requirements, the prompt, or both. "}]">

The following essay examples are written from the point of view of a single applicant who has adapted their narratives to emphasize the specific requirements for different essay prompts. 

1. Why Law?

In surveying the top 100 law schools in North America, the most common principal essay type, by far, is the personal statement, and its most common prompt will ask you why you are pursuing law as a career. The intent of the prompt may be veiled by the prompt’s phrasing, but most law school personal statement prompts seek to assess what steps you took and what experiences you had that led you to apply to law school. 

In a survey of about 35 of the top law schools in Canada and the United States, the following were the most frequently mentioned themes among the prompts for the personal statement:

While the prompt may not be as obvious as “tell us why you are pursuing law as a career”—though some schools may ask this bluntly—you should remember that this is the question you must answer in your personal statement. So, what can you focus on when answering this prompt?

First, the admissions committee is looking to get a better idea of you as a person, your background, experiences, and interests that led you to pursue law. They want to know what makes you unique and how an academic and professional career in law will be significant in your life. To understand this, they need you to provide detailed information. Use examples of your activities, accomplishments, and behavior to make specific points. Avoid being vague or using clichés, such as “I believe in being the change you wish to see in the world.” Law schools will be looking for original thinking in your essay, the “ring of truth” as it pertains to you as an individual, and realistic objectives. They will also be attempting to gauge whether you match their ideal student profile, which you can learn more about by thoroughly researching the law school and citing (only those) aspects that truly reflect you: authenticity should shine through in every line of your essay.

Second, they want to understand how you intend to contribute to the law community in general but also—specifically, and importantly—to the school’s law community. Regardless of any other information suggested by the prompt or what you choose to include in your essay, it should always conclude with a clear sense of the contribution you envision making as a law student. As it may not always be possible to single out a particular law school in your application, for example, if you are applying to law schools which use a unified application system, simply highlight how your personal experiences, skills, and perspective will complement their existing high standards and meet their expectations. Remember, if a letter of intent is a required application component for your chosen schools, you may be faced with prompts asking you to demonstrate why you are the perfect candidate for their school or what you can contribute to their program. 

Third, most remarkable law school personal statements are written in the form of a narrative: after all, it is your “story.” Within this narrative structure, you can insert illustrations of your experiences, knowledge, and skills. It may even be helpful to think of your personal statement as a “picture book.” There is text to tell the story and imagery you suggest through your words to create a picture in the minds of the admissions committee members. You may also wish to describe any challenges, pitfalls, or struggles you have faced along the way and how you chose to address and rise above them, but that will depend on whether you have an opportunity to discuss these in another law school essay prompt. Read on to learn more!!!

Prompt: We would like to know how your background and experiences influenced your decision to apply to law school.

As the self-appointed legal advisor for my friends on the military base where my parents were stationed, I was not prepared for the news that arrived on X day. It went so far beyond what my 14-year-old mind could fathom, even after living in four different countries or being exposed to so many accounts of death and injury as a military child. This was not one of my pals getting caught shoplifting and then turning to me for advice. We had read of this crime in the local paper— the copy they translated and distributed to us at the base. While the punishment for the crime was unimaginable, it was not unheard of. What struck me most was that the accused was the same age as me.

We called ourselves “army brats,” yet I wouldn’t say I felt stigmatized as a child due to my status. After all, most of my time was spent on the base, with kids in the same situation, who didn’t have much else to compare the experience to. Nevertheless, we knew we were different— from civilian peers in our home country, from the residents of the country where we were stationed, and even from each other, as we had all come from different places before arriving there. Sometimes, we were reminded that our difference had value. Sitting there that day, reading the local news to kill time, my two best friends and I realized just how protected we were from our own mistakes. Only a few miles away, another 14-year-old, just like us, would not get a second chance.

Military life is governed by rules and regulations, and even as a child, you’re expected to follow them. To keep everything straight in my mind, I kept a spiral-bound notebook with different chapters for school rules, base rules, military rules, and rules for trips into town. When the context changed, I reorganized my notes, added to them, or crossed out passages. It was an unserious pursuit, which earned me the nickname of “the lawyer,” but after that day, my legal research began in earnest. With guidance from various cherished teachers, mentors, and my parents, I began to educate myself on human rights issues and international law. I felt that if I could understand how things worked, I might one day be in a position to change someone else’s life for the better— someone who, if not for where they were born, could have been me.

Having been obliged to grow up fast, I slowed the pace somewhat when I finally returned to Canada. It was my decision. After being exposed to so many different cultures, I felt a calling to experience my birth country more directly. I initially landed in Toronto, but I did not feel connected to the place. With new friends, I set out on a road trip, travelling as far as Vancouver on the west coast. While passing through Winnipeg, however, I met some students from the University of Manitoba, who inspired me to retrace my steps and settle there. My aim was clear: to complete the four-year Bachelor of Arts in Political Studies and ultimately apply to the interdisciplinary Master of Human Rights.

My personal experience of witnessing political strife in the world, through various lenses, made the BA in Political Studies, with its focus on civil liberties and distributive justice, the perfect introduction to this country and the diverse nations it contains. Further, it helped illuminate my past, which certainly had its dark moments. Courses such as War, Politics, and Culture and the Arab-Israeli Conflict contained themes which resonated deeply; International Relations provided me with a strong foundation in key literature; and Canadian Public Management and Indigenous Governance lit a flame of interest in the history and workings of my own country.

In addition to the intellectual stimulus I crave, I feel like I have found my next home in this university town. Early in my undergraduate career, I began part-time work at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and have since become deeply involved as a researcher and volunteer with the Centre for Human Rights Research (CHRR). These activities, coupled with my academic achievements, have only confirmed my commitment to this area of law. I know it will define my future just as certainly as it shaped my past. Since completing the Master of Human Rights at the University of Manitoba, I now see the Juris Doctor degree as an essential next step in advancing my planned advocacy work, and I can hardly wait to extend and expand my contribution to the thriving legal community in Winnipeg.

Want more law school personal statement examples from top law schools?

• Harvard law school personal statement examples
• Columbia law school personal statement examples
• Cornell law school personal statement examples
• Yale law school personal statement examples
• UPenn law school personal statement examples
• Cambridge law school personal statement examples

Writing your optional essay? Check this out:

2. Why Our Law School?

As previously noted, a law school letter of intent is different from a personal statement. Most importantly, it should explain why you wish to attend a specific law school and what you hope to contribute. A law school letter of intent would be sent to only one or two schools and would emphasize why you are perfect for their program. For this reason, a generic draft will not work as well in crafting your letter of intent as it would for your personal statement, as the letter should demonstrate that you have done your research. Reading some well-written examples can guide you toward producing a professional, polished letter that will improve your chances of being admitted.

* As with all other essay types, check the specific length and formatting requirements for your chosen law school. In fact, given the focused nature of this essay, it is even more important to be absolutely certain of the requirements.

Prompt: Please explain what motivated you to apply to (our law school).

Dear Admissions Committee,

After completing the Master of Human Rights at UM Law, I am now hoping to pursue the prestigious Juris Doctor degree. I believe my educational and professional background, much of which has been anchored in the Winnipeg academic and legal community, is ideally suited to success in this program.

My goal is to perform human rights advocacy, and for the past four years, I have been honing my skills in this area. As an undergraduate, various initiatives I joined enabled me to build my professional network. For example, I became deeply involved as a volunteer researcher with the Centre for Human Rights Research. During my master’s degree, I contributed to two studies addressing domestic procedural protections affecting refugee claimants, and as a result, I was recommended to a research position with the Manitoba Council for International Cooperation.

Having deepened my knowledge of human rights law, I am now seeking to further my clinical experience and skills as a lawyer and polish my scholarly writing abilities. These objectives seem perfectly aligned with your program’s emphasis on experiential learning, writing, and critical analysis. Furthermore, I see an advanced understanding of ethics and diverse perspectives as an essential aspect of human rights law.

In addition to the intellectual stimulus I crave, I feel like I have found my next home in this university town, and acceptance to the Juris Doctor would allow me to both continue my current work and expand my contribution to the thriving legal community at the University and in Winnipeg.

Claude Madden

3. What Can You Contribute to Our Campus/Incoming Class?

This is a very common prompt/theme in law school diversity statements and optional essays. As a diversity statement is often optional, you may question whether you should submit one. Perhaps you have made some assumptions concerning what constitutes “diversity,” but not everyone is raised in a single-parent household; not everyone has been an Olympic athlete; not everyone had to work throughout undergrad to get that bachelor’s degree; not everyone in your class will have an intercultural marriage. Everyone has a unique story to tell, and yours does not have to be in accordance with a traditional understanding of diversity. While a diversity statement may be optional, we advise you to take every opportunity to make your application stand out. Tell the committee what experiences have formed you. What makes you different from your peers? The key here is to think of experiences that would broaden the horizon of your classmates and faculty. Think of what would make a great narrative. Once you have settled on a few key features that set you apart, describe their impact on your life and your decision to attend law school. Maybe you’re not sure what makes you unique. In this case, let law school admissions consulting services help you find your story!

* As with all other essay types, check the specific length and formatting requirements for your chosen law school. Note that stand-alone diversity statements are often shorter, typically 500 words or less.

Example of “What Can You Contribute to Our Campus/Incoming Class?” Essay

Prompt: Describe any unique qualities you feel will contribute to the diversity of (our law school).  

Growing up in a military family has its pros and cons. Being a member of a subculture does set you apart. We called ourselves “army brats,” yet I wouldn’t say I felt stigmatized as a child due to my status. After all, most of my time was spent on the base, with kids in the same situation, who didn’t have much else to compare the experience to.

From the military, I learned the importance of “seizing the day” and “making the most of things,” especially as I grew older and developed stronger attachments to places or people. One of the most difficult periods is when your parent is first deployed. There is the emotional turmoil, of course, and the constant worry, but there is also the need and expectation for you to be more independent than you are ready to be. I quickly understood how to stick to a schedule and take responsibility for myself, including meals, homework, and bedtime. Later, in my volunteering, I helped other young people take charge of their lives, for example, by teaching them how to find the necessary resources to address a range of legal issues, from misdemeanors to tenant conflicts. 

Military life is also governed by rules and regulations, and even as a child, you’re expected to learn them. You absorb “respect,” almost by osmosis, because you’re surrounded by this sense of order, sacrifice for the greater good, and dedication. It’s a demanding way of life, even for the families. In addition to the military rules, you need to know what to expect when you leave the base: what to wear, how to behave, how to speak. You need to understand what is culturally and legally accepted in each new country, and what is not. Through exposure to the pros and cons of diverse legal systems, I developed both an interest in international law as well as a pronounced desire to engage in advocacy.

From a young age, I kept a spiral-bound notebook to keep track of all the rules that governed my life. I associate those rules, written in the pencil scratch of my younger self, with certain challenges I faced and overcame. While my peers often found the rules oppressive, this pastime of mine made them more fun or interesting. To this day, researching precedents and authority associated with case law is one of my favorite tasks.

On the base, when we didn’t agree with or understand the rules in every situation or country, various cherished teachers, mentors, and our parents helped explain them. However, when I returned to Canada, it was up to me to acquire all the knowledge I needed about a place that, despite being my birth country, was completely unfamiliar. This personal quest, coupled with my ingrained appreciation for regulations, made me well qualified to help people I encountered in academic and daily life better understand the law and, perhaps more importantly, why it exists. My experiences have also highlighted areas where the right law, or even justice, is lacking. In my research on domestic procedural protections affecting refugee claimants, I had the opportunity to study recent literature on the topic but also work directly with clients. In addition to advising them on the law and training them to be independent in conducting their own information searches, I often assisted them in resolving school and housing issues. In this way, I expanded my knowledge of related fields, such as property and education law, and developed a deep respect for the Canadian legal system with its inherent sense of fairness and justice. I nurtured a love of advocacy and took real pleasure in successfully helping someone out of a tough spot. Perhaps most importantly, I confirmed what I believe I knew intuitively all along— that law will define my future just as certainly as it shaped my past. My enthusiasm, the practical tips I can offer my classmates, and my ability to work collaboratively as part of a team are qualities I believe will certainly contribute significantly to the school.

This is your cue to discuss anything else that has not been addressed in your application. Most often, with this prompt, the admissions committee is giving you a chance to discuss any setbacks you experienced. You might have discussed some of them in your other essays already, but you should know that there may be specific essays that are designated for such topics. The law school addendum , as the name implies, refer to additional information. During your research, care should be taken to discern how each law school defines this essay type.

For example, the term “addenda” might be used to refer to addenda to your LSAT score, that is, an explanation of your low grade, or it could indicate a more general optional essay to provide supplementary information that you think might be important when considering your application. But most often, addenda should address any red flags you may have in your academic and personal background. Even if you find no information indicating that they are looking for explanations of your low GPA or lack of professional experience, it is always best to address the issue.

Why? Because you do not want the committee to come up with their own reasons for these setbacks. Instead, explain that maybe you had to work throughout your undergrad to support yourself and that resulted in lower hours of legal experience, but that your job taught you x, y, z skills necessary for law school. Or maybe there was a death in your family in second year and your grades suffered. Remember the key to these essays: show what you learned from these experiences. Do not blame anyone else for your setbacks. These tend to happen to everyone! What the committee wants to see is your takeaway.

* As with all other essay types, check the specific length and formatting requirements for your chosen law school. Note that the length of the optional essay varies significantly between law schools.

Example of “Is There Anything Else Regarding your Academic or Personal Background We Should Know About?” Essay

Prompt: Describe any extenuating circumstances affecting your grades or other aspects of your academic performance that you think we should be aware of.

I wanted to take this opportunity to explain certain extenuating circumstances which influenced my academic career path and my performance during my first year of undergraduate studies.

As a military child, I had to grow up fast and learn to be independent. For the most part, this experience has been a positive one, as it instilled a sense of self-reliance and encouraged me to take responsibility for my own learning. I attended five different schools from kindergarten through high school, and my college-level education was conducted entirely online. This situation, while valuable in terms of the variety of instructional contexts and styles, nevertheless had its pitfalls. In the transition process between schools, I often found myself either ahead of or behind my peers, and I experienced some gaps in content that I only became aware of much later, as no one was formally monitoring the curriculum flow.

My return to Canada to register for university was delayed due to an injury in the family. As my parents were struggling to reconcile conflicting needs, I took a gap year— six months on the base and a subsequent six months when I returned to Canada. Although I was used to being without one or both of my parents for extended periods, I always had a stable place to live, and my needs were taken care of. In Canada, however, I felt truly alone and homeless, and I dealt with that by traveling extensively. While I believe this was initially a coping mechanism, it ultimately restored a sense of peace and my confidence. Importantly, I made friends who shared my interests, specifically in human rights issues and the law. I subsequently gained the information I needed to choose a higher education path and decided to apply to the Political Studies program at the University of Manitoba.

When I settled in Winnipeg, I found that while our family income basically covered my school tuition, it did not cover my living expenses. I was already exhausted when I started university and could not quite find my rhythm until after the winter break. You will note that once this stage passed and I found regular work that complemented my academics, my grades came up significantly. I have been able to maintain a high GPA since then, including during my master’s degree, but not as high as it might have been if the circumstances had been better in the beginning. I hope that you will consider this in your assessment of my application and see it not as a failing but as an indicator of my persistence and dedication to overcoming obstacles.

As you will note from all these essays, the applicant has developed a core narrative, which truly defines them as a person, as a student, and as an applicant to law school. In each essay, they return to the same key features, either mentioning them briefly or building on them in more detail. Consequently, if one or more essays were required or suggested by their preferred law school, they could easily edit these drafts to delete repetition and expand essential points. Note the importance of focusing on different topics and priorities in each essay for the same school.

Most importantly, all these essays show (rather than tell) that the applicant knows who they are and where they would like to go. Moreover, they are not afraid to embrace and integrate the more challenging aspects of where they have been. This paints a picture for the admissions committee of a lively, engaged, diligent, confident, and courageous individual who would likely be considered an asset to their law school.

Again, it is essential to check the requirements of each law school to discern which type of essay is required. Often, more than one type is required, suggested, or proposed as an “optional” essay. Sometimes, all three types are sort of rolled into one: for example, you may be expected in your personal statement to include responses to diversity prompts (e.g., cultural background) and/or addenda (e.g., gap year activities). In all cases, it is important to respect the precise requirements for each law school applied to.

Law school admission essays are intended to complete your application package and give the law school a better idea of who you are as a person and why you are a good candidate for admission. The purpose of these essays is to provide supplementary information about yourself and your motivation for applying to law school that is not reflected in your grades or other supporting documents. You might include volunteer, work, or research experience if you have not already covered them in other parts of your application. While it is not necessary for every activity to be specifically related to law, it is important to show how they might contribute to your law school and career plans.

You may be asked to discuss how your background and experiences influenced your decision to go to law school, why you are motivated to study law, or what made you decide to choose a specific law school. Virtually all law schools have criteria for the type of statement they require and provide some general guidelines, even if they don’t provide highly specific prompts. However, certain law schools do provide very unique and surprising prompts, so it is important to research your short list of law schools carefully to ensure that you identify the correct requirements.

Typically, law school essay prompts are “evergreen”; that is, they are always available for consultation on their web site. Most law schools do not require several rounds of essays or invite applicants individually to write on specific prompts, as some graduate schools do.

A letter of intent is not the same as a personal statement, but it may replace the personal statement. Typically, it is a more formal statement which emphasizes your experiences and skills that prepare you for a specific law program. Law schools that request a letter of intent usually provide more detailed criteria for their expectations; therefore, it is important to verify the requirements carefully.

Yes, as each person is unique, chances are they have something to contribute that is different from their peers. The diversity statement is a real opportunity to stand out from the crowd by highlighting your background, experiences, contributions, and ideas. Anyone should consider the benefits that writing a diversity statement may bring to the application process.

If the essay is categorized as “optional,” it is unlikely that you are obliged to provide one. Some law schools emphasize the optional essay for certain applicants, such as those who could benefit from diversity opportunities or who need to explain their grades. However, even if you don’t check such a box, it is advisable to write the optional essay to stand out and increase your chances of being accepted.

Many law schools provide the opportunity to explain lower grades, extenuating circumstances, gap years, and other issues in an “optional essay” or “addendum,” and this is therefore the proper channel to inform the law school of your situation. If only one essay is allowed as part of the application process, yes, it would certainly be appropriate to write a concise statement on this topic, while emphasizing how you addressed and overcame the problem. No one is perfect, and challenges can often allow other personal strengths to emerge.

If no prompts are provided, focus on answering the question “why do you want to be a lawyer?”

Always stick to the prompt, as this is the information the law school wishes to know. Moreover, it shows that you can follow instructions, are detail-oriented, and have tailored your response to a particular school’s requirements.

Follow the guidelines. If no guidelines are provided, try to stay within 600–800 words.

The number of essays varies, depending on the school. Carefully verify the requirements for each school to which you apply.

At BeMo, we have consultants who can help with many stages of your law school application process, including essay writing.

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What You Can Expect from Your Law School Experience

Law schools offer a range of programs to fit your career ambitions and schedule. Most law schools share a common first-year approach to educating lawyers, with much more variation in the second and third years, such as opportunities for specialized programs, judicial clerkships, legal externships, participation in clinical programs and moot court, and involvement with public interest and governmental agencies. Meet real students who share their stories of activism, public service, and international travel as part of their law school education. Law school can be an intense, competitive environment–but the rewards are considerable.

The First Year

Your journey officially begins. The work will be challenging, and professors expect you to arrive at every class thoroughly prepared. Most professors give little feedback until the final examination for the course, and most course grades are determined primarily from end-of-semester or end-of-year exams.

Free Tools to Help You Get through Law School

Law School Unmasked, a free introductory course offered as a part of LawHub TM Ultimate Law School Prep, provides a roadmap to your first semester. Learn the skills you need to thrive in law school.

The Case Method Approach

The case method is unfamiliar for many first-year law students. It involves the detailed examination of a number of related judicial opinions that describe an area of law. You may be asked questions designed to explore the facts presented, to determine the legal principles applied in reaching a decision, or to analyze the method of reasoning used. In this way, professors encourage you to relate the case to others and to distinguish it from those with similar, but inapplicable, precedents.

By focusing on the underlying principles that shape the law’s approach to different situations, you will learn to distinguish among subtly different legal results and to identify the critical factors that determine a particular outcome.

The Ability to Think

There is an adage that the primary purpose of law school is to teach you to think like a lawyer. This is reinforced through the case method approach. Although the memorization of specifics may be useful to you, the ability to be analytical and literate is considerably more important than the power of total recall. Because laws continually change and evolve, specific rules may quickly lose their relevance, but the ability to think critically will be of the highest value. This is why critical thinking ability is assessed on the LSAT as a predictor of likelihood of success, and why preparing for the LSAT helps students once they’re in law school.

The Curriculum

As a first-year law student, you will follow a designated course of study that may cover many of the following subjects:

• Civil procedure —the process of adjudication in the United States such as jurisdiction and standing to sue, motions and pleadings, pretrial procedure, the structure of a lawsuit, and appellate review of trial results.
• Constitutional law —the legislative powers of the federal and state governments, and questions of civil liberties and constitutional history, including detailed study of the Bill of Rights and constitutional freedoms.
• Contracts —the nature of enforceable promises and rules for determining appropriate remedies in case of nonperformance.
• Criminal law and criminal procedure —bases of criminal responsibility, the rules and policies for enforcing sanctions against individuals accused of committing offenses against the public order and well-being, and the rights guaranteed to those charged with criminal violations.
• Legal method —students’ introduction to the organization of the American legal system and its processes.
• Legal writing —learning legal research and writing are critical elements of most first-year law school experiences.
• Property law —concepts, uses, and historical developments in the treatment of land, buildings, natural resources, and personal objects.
• Torts —private wrongs, such as acts of negligence, assault, and defamation, that violate obligations of the law.

In addition to attending classes, you may be required to participate in a moot court exercise in which you must argue a hypothetical court case.

After the first year, you will likely have the opportunity to select from a broad range of courses. Most students will take foundation courses in administrative law, civil litigation, commercial law, corporations, evidence, family law, professional responsibility, taxation, and wills and trusts before completing their degree. Every law school supplements this basic curriculum with additional courses, such as international law, environmental law, conflict of laws, labor law, criminal procedure, and jurisprudence, and many law schools include clinical (experiential) opportunities as well.

Extracurricular Activities

Student organizations are a great supplement to classroom learning. Typically, these organizations are dedicated to advancing the interests of particular groups of law students, such as Black students, female students, Hispanic students, or LGBTQ students. Other groups promote greater understanding of specific legal fields, such as environmental or international law, or provide opportunities for involvement in professional, social, and sports activities.

A unique feature of American law schools is that law students manage and edit most of the legal profession’s principal scholarly journals. Membership on the editorial staffs of these journals is considered a mark of academic distinction. Selection is ordinarily based on outstanding academic performance and writing ability.

LAW SCHOOL SURVIVAL GUIDE

It depends. A guide to surviving law school.

Practicing law means being comfortable with ambiguity..

It involves telling clients, partners and strangers at cocktail parties, “it depends” – it depends on the facts of the case, the jurisdiction, the individual judge, the terms and conditions, and more. One thing you can know with absolute certainty is that you’ll thrive and survive in law school with tons of planning, preparation and lots of legwork.

We can help you know more now with “It Depends: A Law School Survival Guide.”

WHAT TO EXPECT

On average, law students spend 30% of their waking hours studying.

You may have already discovered that  – but are you making the most of that time so you retain what you read and are productive with your writing time? Keep in mind, there are tactics you can practice to make the most of your time. In fact, time management is crucial to your success in law school.

Consider these tips to help you manage.

Start studying early

It’s never too early to study. The sooner you begin studying case briefs and your class notes, the quicker you’ll start to understand the law. Developing condensed versions of your outlines will help you process the information.

Keep a running to-do list

And estimate how long it will take you to do each class task. (Hint: Review each task at the start of the day.) A to-do list will keep you on track and will give you an idea of the tasks you need to devote more time to.

Break down large projects

Think of law school like a marathon – a long race, not a sprint. Adjusting your mindset, however, will help you to not feel overwhelmed. Split your class projects up into smaller tasks and reward yourself when each section is complete.

Find a good balance between law school and free time; maintain an updated calendar of all your assignments, classes and activities. Make sure to schedule in time for a weekly review.

Adapting to Law School

5 ways to get the most out of your law school experience .

It’s your first year in law school. You’ve been waiting years for this moment – now that you’re finally here, what do you do? Well, it depends. For starters – be nice to your classmates. We know what you’re thinking: “I’m really a nice person. I’m very self-aware and I’m not going to be that person in class.” Here are five ways to be your best self and get the most from your law school experience.

Find out more

EFFECTIVE STUDY

A key part of success at law school is learning how to study effectively. We’ve got some great tips for you.

While time in the classroom can be demanding, studying is an even larger piece of the law school pie. And though class readings, outlining and briefing may feel overwhelming at times, there are ways you can incorporate ‘fun’ into the fundamentals of studying.

Survival Guide

Don't pull an all-nighter for a research assignment.

Don’t dread getting called on in class. How to handle cold-calling.

Outlines: they can save or break you., supplements: to use or not to use that is the question., exams: it's showtime. the dos and don'ts of preparation., do you know your legal stuff.

What is the definition of demurrer and what is it commonly known as? Heads up, it is not another word for modesty.

Class Preparation

Helpful Resources by Class.

A sampling of curated content powered by Quimbee . Sample exams. Outlines. Case Briefs.

Class Guide

Civil procedure, torts , criminal law, constitutional law.

Career Preparation

You landed the law school. Now, how do you land the job?

It depends on whether you’ve put in the time and effort through law school.

Network, network, network!

One of the most important skills lawyers can develop is the ability to attract new clients. Take stock of your network by making a list of all your acquaintances and resources. These resources include your law school placement office, social groups, law school contacts and professors. Ask your network to review your resume and introduce you to attorneys from the firms you are targeting.

Build an awesome resume – right away.

Updating your resume throughout law school will be beneficial when the time comes to studying for the bar exam. Be proactive about updating your resume and looking for summer associate opportunities – it will come fast! As you build out your resume, consider:

• Making your resume concise. Keep your resume short and straight-forward. Employers may not read every word, so include the most relevant, valuable information.
• Tailoring your resume to the job. While you may have a resume template, make sure your skills and qualifications are tailored to the job.

Don’t forget to prep for OCIs.

Practice makes perfect. Be sure to research the firm before your interview and practice anticipated questions with family and friends. Also, treat every firm interview like it’s your top choice.

Unsure about a practice area? Explore different career options.

Our podcast series, created by Practical Law editors, features legal experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities within different practice areas – along with specific skills needed to be a successful legal professional.

A Practical Start to Your Career

Privacy & Security

A practical start to your career

Start-Ups and Venture Capitalists

A Practical start to your career

Trust & Estates

Discover more epsiodes

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Looking for something else? Explore these other topics in the Law School Survival Guide.

Get the 411 on terms you'll need to know throughout Law School

The best free resources for law school subjects

Law School Portal

Legal Research & Writing

Cold-Calling

Supplements

Come and join in the conversation on our social channels.

Cozy up with Westlaw to win an Amazon Fall Haul!

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Fuel Your Research with Key Numbers - Bonus Entries

Need some inspiration check out these key numbers by using the digest searches below., find your rhythm with black's law dictionary - bonus entries, need some inspiration check out these legal terms by using the the links below., westlaw's "no skips" tips playlist, real property, show westlaw some love.

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Statutes on Westlaw - Bonus Entries

Need some inspiration check out the statutes below., key numbers on westlaw - bonus entries, searching on westlaw - bonus entries, need some search inspiration for your entries check out the sample searches below.

Because neurodivergent people often need visual prompts or sensory tools, it is helpful to figure out what works best for you. Maybe you need a quiet fidget to use under your desk in class to help you focus. Maybe you need to incorporate the use of timers throughout your day. If you struggle with time blindness, you can use hourglasses to help you visualize time. Perhaps you struggle with extraneous sounds and need to use noise-cancelling headphones. More and more tools and gadgets are being made for neurodiverse individuals that can help you throughout law school.

Society can dictate when you are supposed to be most productive. See the traditional 9-5 work schedule. However, that model does not always work best for neurodiverse individuals. Some people are not morning people, and that is fine. Figure out when you have the most energy during your day to be your most productive self.

Find one system to use for organization and don’t change it. Trying too many organizational systems can become overwhelming. If your phone calendar works best, use that. If you are a list person, write all the lists. If you are a planner person, find the coolest one to use throughout the school year.

It would be nice to think that you can remember every task or deadline, but let’s be honest, that’s probably not true. Write down every deadline, every task, meeting, assignment, important date, etc. in the organizational system that you use.

Just like you can only put so much gasoline in a car, most neurodiverse individuals only have so much room in their focus tank. Figure out how long you can truly focus and apply yourself to a task before you need a break. That amount of time is typically shorter for neurodiverse individuals. If you can only truly focus for 20 minutes, study for 20 minutes, take a break, and then come back for another 20 minutes.

You may have started law school with your mind full of horror stories. Throw them out the window. Most of the people you attend law school with are genuinely kind and helpful people. Try to find a group or a couple of people that you can trust and lean on when necessary. Your law school friends can help you stay on task, body double, and even provide notes on the days you may be struggling. These friends can be one of your greatest assets throughout your law school journey.

Only discuss your neurodivergence with your professors to the extent that you are comfortable. If there are things you are concerned about related to your neurodivergence, it can be beneficial to make your professors aware at the beginning of the semester. Whether you are worried about cold calling or need a topic broken down, most professors love opportunities to discuss their area of law! They can’t know that you may need help if you don’t let them know. This is especially important if you aren’t successful in getting accommodations from your school’s Disability Services.

As a neurodivergent student, you may not fit the traditional mold of all the things a law student is “supposed to do” in order to be successful. You have been in school for years, and now is the time to trust yourself and not be afraid to be an “outside of the box” law student. There is no harm in trying new study methods, but never fear going back to your personal basics. If you need help figuring those out, see if your law school has a learning center or faculty member that can assist you.

Outlining with jury instructions.

• On your Westlaw Precision home screen, click on Secondary Sources and then Jury Instructions .
• On the Jury Instructions page, use the Jurisdiction filter to select your desired jurisdiction.
• Search for your cause of action. (Ex. elements of libel in Federal Jury Practice & Instructions )
• Open your relevant jury instruction and don't forget to check the related notes.
• To see more instructions, check out the table of contents to your left or click on View Full TOC.

Citation in a Click

• Highlight the text you want to copy. Try it out with Miranda v. Arizona
• Select "Copy with Reference" from the pop-up box.
• Paste into your word document...and you're done!

Black's Law Dictionary

Don't guess the meaning of a legal term. know it., by using black’s law dictionary, exclusively on westlaw , you’ll know the meanings of key terms that will help you understand your cases faster, be prepared for cold-calls and beef up your class notes. 1. access black's law dictionary on westlaw., 2. type your term into the dictionary term box. (ex. demurrer ) if your term contains multiple words, place the terms in quotes. (ex. "rule against perpetuities" ), 3. open up your desired term, copy it and paste it into your notes., looking for some inspiration here are a few legal terms to get you started contracts - collateral estoppel - consequential damages civil procedure - minimum contacts - in personam jurisdiction torts - negligence - invasion of privacy criminal law - mayhem - wobbler, where can i learn more about a firm so i can ask good questions in an interview, news is an excellent source for learning about a firm. you’ll see the clients and matters they represent along with the accolades they earned from their communities. 1. click on news under “specialty areas” on your westlaw edge home screen., 2. start by trying a plain language search for your firm. (ex. gibson dunn crutcher ), 3. to up your search game, consider running a terms & connectors search with an index field. (ex. gibson /2 dunn /s crutcher & in(law lawsuit legal) ), start writing your brief without starting from scratch, what is a brief, a brief is a summary of a case in your own words that includes the key facts, procedural history, issues addressed, along with the court's holdings. how can i find a case on westlaw, cases on westlaw contain a synopsis, a summary of the main facts, issues and holdings of a case, and headnotes, summaries of points of law organizes by topic. you can locate cases on westlaw in a variety of ways. find by citation: if you know your case's citation, just type one of the citations in the search box. (ex. 113 sct 2217 ), find by party name: if you know the names of your parties, just start typing them in the search box and select corresponding case from the drop-down menu. (ex. international shoe).

Note: If your case has common party names, you may need to enter more than one party.

Download your synopsis and headnotes: once you've pulled up your case, click on download under delivery options, select brief it under what to deliver and click on download..

The right search terms can make a difference. Here is an easy way to come up with smart search terms.

Rules, Codes & Restatements

Exporting tables of contents, exporting a table of contents is an easy way to get access to a list of rules, codes or restatements that you can reference on the fly and add to your outlines, as needed. locate your rules, codes or restatement: to export a toc (table of contents), you'll first want to locate your resource. restatement of torts restatement of contracts restatement of property federal rules of civil procedure ucc article 2 federal rules of evidence united states constitution, export your toc: click on download, select outline of current view under what to deliver and then click on download..

Strengthen Your Interview Discussions with News

• Search for a particular firm, attorney, or agency. (Ex. Kirkland and Ellis or Fourth Circuit )
• Or select a specific practice area (Ex. Mergers & Acquisitions )

American Law Reports

Your go-to secondary source, finding an a.l.r. (american law reports) article covering your topic is a great starting point for research. you'll get a quick summary of the legal issue you're researching and a table of cases, laws, and rules to see the law across all jurisdictions. you can also use annotations to find additional secondary sources, such as legal encyclopedias, treatises, and periodicals. no wonder they're nicknamed already done legal research see it in action: the legal discussion to compensate student athletes is heating up. check out this alr article to see how the legal picture for tomorrow’s student athletes comes together in one place., keycite graphical history, procedural history made easy, are you reading a case and not sure how you got there procedurally reversed, remanded or otherwise, we got you. just sign into westlaw and follow the steps below... 1. grab one of the citations you see in your case book and type it into the search box on westlaw . (ex. 480 u.s. 102), 2. click on your case in the drop-down menu., 3. click on the history tab to see your procedural history., keycite graphical history works best when you have a federal case and a complex issue. check out some additional examples from your classes below. contracts - koken v. black & veatch const., inc. - lamps plus, inc. v. varela civil procedure - national equipment rental v. szukhent - helicopteros nacionales de colombia, s.a. v. hall torts - palsgraf v. long island r. co. - kentucky fried chicken of cal., inc. v. superior court, law school resource center, flowcharts, overviews & more..

Step 1 - Create a New Class

Step 3 - invite your students, step 2 - assign lessons.

About this event

Love Your Lawyer Day

All the rules you need for class in one place.

Understand the procedural history of your case..

Don't guess the meaning of a term. Know it.

Copy the Code Below

You'll use this code to make a copy of the sample course.

Click on Copy Another Class

Go to the Knowledge Center and click on the Copy Another Class button.

Enter Your Copy Code

Enter your copy code in the Enter Class Copy Code box and click the Validate button.

4. Set Your Options

Change your course title, set your course dates and set your copy option to Assignments Only.

5. Click Copy Course

Click on Copy Course and you're all set to share your course with students.

1. Copy the Code Below

2. click on copy another class, 3. enter your copy code, set your options, click copy course, determining whether a federal court has subject matter jurisdiction over a non-class action case..

If the case arises out of the U.S. Constitution, U.S. laws, rules or regulations, or a treaty signed by the U.S., and the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction, then the case must be litigated in federal court.

If the case does not arise out of the U.S. Constitution, U.S. laws, rules or regulations, or a treaty signed by the U.S., and there is not complete diversity between the plaintiffs and defendants (a.k.a they are both from different states or one is a citizen of a foreign country), then the case must be litigated in state court.

Restatement of Contracts 2d

Counter-offers.

(1) A counter-offer is an offer made by an offeree to his offeror relating to the same matter as the original offer and proposing a substituted bargain differing from that proposed by the original offer.

(2) An offeree’s power of acceptance is terminated by his making of a counter-offer, unless the offeror has manifested a contrary intention or unless the counter-offer manifests a contrary intention of the offeree.

Negligence Defined

Restatement (second) of torts 282.

In the Restatement of this Subject, negligence is conduct which falls below the standard established by law for the protection of others against unreasonable risk of harm. It does not include conduct recklessly disregardful of an interest of others.

Black’s Law Dictionary (10th ed.2014)

Demurrer: A means of objecting to the sufficiency in law of a pleading by admitting the actual allegations made by disputing that they frame an adequate claim. Demurrer is commonly known as a motion to dismiss.

(2) An offeree’s power of acceptance is terminated by his making a counter-off, unless the offeror has manifested a contrary intention or unless the counter-offer manifests a contrary intention of the offeree.

testing footnote

What is common law and is it written by the courts of law?

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Negligence defined

Restatement (second) of torts § 282.

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What are Typical Law School Courses?

Sep 3, 2021 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Are you curious about what to expect as a student earning a Juris Doctor ? Although class titles and coursework may differ, nearly all law schools offer certain core courses and electives.

Of course, as you progress through your degree, you’ll find more opportunities to personalize your classes. But in the first year of law school, you can expect to complete several core classes while learning how to think like a lawyer.

Whether you want to prepare now or catch up on some pre-law reading, explore what you’ll learn in typical law school courses while discovering the skills and outcomes required for success.

What are the common law school methods of studies?

As an undergraduate student, you may have experienced mainly lectures and labs, but law schools focus heavily on the case method approach.

The case method looks at judicial opinions related to an area of law, usually from appellate courts reviewing decisions of lower courts. Professors ask students to show how the court reasoned through the law, facts, and precedents to reach its decision. You may be asked about the method of reasoning, facts that were most relevant and important, precedents, and legal principles. While it’s vital to know the black letter rules of law, you must understand how to apply the rules to different fact patterns. With the case method approach, you’ll learn how small differences in facts can lead to big variations in outcomes.

What skills will law students learn and refine?

Before heading into law school, it helps to brush up on the skills you’ll need to tackle a challenging workload. While you’ll continue to work on and improve these abilities during your J.D. degree classes, you can be prepared by taking pre-law courses or reading books before school starts. Your studies will hone your talents in areas such as:

• Critical reading comprehension
• Problem-solving and lateral thinking
• Persuasive, concise, and error-free writing
• Oral communication and listening
• Legal research using verbal questioning and evaluation
• Analytical and interpretation abilities
• Reasoning and judgment
• Organization and time-management

Which classes teach practical skills?

Although all courses aim to teach you to be a well-rounded lawyer, skills classes emphasize practical exercises that refine your talents in a realistic setting. For instance, you may perform role-playing exercises to conduct mediations, negotiations, or arbitrations of different cases. Or you may be asked to complete a property title search. Your skills tests and practice exercises depend on your selected courses. At St. Francis, our J.D. curriculum has a variety of classes to hone your abilities, such as:

• Alternative Dispute Resolution
• Evidence I and II
• Professional Skills I through V
• Trusts, Wills, and Estates
• Business Associations I and II
• Intellectual Property I and II
• Community Property I and II
• Real Property I and II
• Legal Negotiation
• Contract Drafting

St. Francis also provides access to LexisNexis. This digital legal database houses tons of law review articles and practice guides, so your work in this online library improves your research efforts and ability to navigate law practice.

How will course goals and outcomes differ?

While all doctrinal courses want to teach you the rules, it’s also vital to learn how to apply them. You’ll find that many classes have additional goals. Your instructor may focus on several objectives in addition to teaching you the law. A traditional or hybrid law school program covers:

• Lawyering problems before, during, and after the case
• What is statutory construction
• The historical development of doctrinal rules
• Juris prudential and philosophical frameworks
• Implications of gender or race
• Law and economics perspectives
• Ethical and professional responsibility
• Procedural issues
• Pivotal versus irrelevant facts
• Underlying policies behind the rules

How do professors teach and assess skills?

Professors use a combination of questions, hypothetical scenarios, and written or oral exercises. Your class format may focus on the policy, or theory behind the core concepts, but will almost always demonstrate its application to real-world situations. Furthermore, many instructors offer practical, real-life tips for applying what you’ve learned to real-life cases. Your work may include:

• Transaction-oriented skills like mock negotiations and drafting exercises
• Litigation-orientated training via a moot court, including arguing a motion and questioning a witness
• Litigation drafting exercises for jury instructions, pleadings, and motions
• How to take apart a case and break it down into facts, issue, precedent, rule, case holding, and application
• Statutory construction and legislative drafting exercises

What skills courses do you take during law school?

Students enroll in several skills-based courses that emphasize teamwork and practical training. In each class, it’s crucial to do more than memorize the material. Instead, law students must understand the policies that support the rules and apply their knowledge to various fact patterns. You’ll be expected to showcase your competence in doing this via written assignments, online exercises, and law school exams .

Torts are defined as civil wrongs done by one party to another. They include things like negligence and defamation, which are torts both accidental and on purpose. Personal injury law or tort law courses teach you about various civil suits. These may include intentional torts, negligence, medical malpractice, product liability, and personal injury claims.

During a torts course, you’ll explore situations like car accidents or food recalls. You’ll then determine whether a law requires compensation to a victim, whether it’s unintentionally or intentionally caused. Students also learn the differences between intentional, negligent, and strict liability torts.

A course on contracts provides the framework for consumer and commercial law. Often, a contract course looks closely at both the common law of contracts and the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC). Your instructor helps J.D. students navigate common problems or mistakes that affect agreements and legal outcomes. During your studies, you’ll learn:

• Principles of contracts, from entering to enforcing
• Purpose of legal agreements
• Differences between bargains and gifts
• Interpretation of legal terms
• Remedies for a breach of contract

A Contracts course provides invaluable information, even for those not practicing law, because contracts are so important to everyday life outside of being a lawyer.

Civil Procedure

A civil procedure course teaches you about the state and federal judicial system, including the powers of courts, the differences between federal and state courts, and the steps to bring civil lawsuits. For example, you’ll learn the trial rules, evidence gathering during discovery, preparing court filings such as pleadings, and how to appeal a decision.

An essential skill gained during this course is critical thinking. You must understand how the constitution limits the power of courts to hear cases while also comprehending how each phase of the case moves you towards resolution. Your instructor may use a combination of written assignments, exams, and simulations.

Property law

A property law course focuses on real property, like land and houses. You may also learn about who owns natural resources, and what happens to property when it is unclaimed. There are several areas of property law that you’ll cover, including:

• Freehold and non-freehold estates
• Personal property
• Landlord and tenant agreements
• Eminent domain

Property law courses prepare you for real life. You’ll learn about property transactions from mortgages to land purchase agreements and even foreclosures. Having this knowledge gives you an advantage as you navigate buying a house or other property.

Constitutional law

This essential law school course focuses on the federal constitution and its amendments, including the Bill of Rights. You’ll learn about the roles — and limits — of the three branches of government (judicial, legislative, and executive) while exploring individual liberties and fundamental rights. A constitutional law course looks at how the constitution affects judicial processes as well, with a heavy emphasis on due process.

During this course, you will develop legal analysis skills and learn how to counter-argue even if it’s not a position you necessarily personally support.

Criminal law and procedure

In the Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure courses, you’ll explore the rules and procedures relevant to crimes, criminal charges, pretrial processes, and criminal trials. This in-depth look at criminal law and criminal procedure discusses the concepts of arrest, search, and seizure while explaining what defines a warrantless search or seizure of persons or automobiles. Students also cover topics like:

• Crimes like murder, robbery, and larceny, and how they are defined
• Fourth amendment surveillance issues
• Title III of the Crime Control Act
• Definitions of terms related to criminal law
• Exclusionary Rules and the Good Faith exception
• Sixth Amendment right to counsel
• Provisions of the Miranda Rule
• Due process

Along with learning the meanings of various topics, J.D. students also learn about the issues surrounding witness testimony, the production of documents, and post-trial procedures.

Moot court or mock trials

A moot court exercise may be part of any of your typical law school courses. With a moot court, you make arguments to a judge or panel of judges on a legal issue you are studying, using a simulated case file and legal research you have compiled and studied. You also answer questions from your peers. It differs from a mock trial that involves witness testimony in front of a jury; this is just legal arguments based on a set of agreed or supplied facts.

In both cases, your instructor provides a hypothetical situation. Then you’re in charge of writing a brief, conducting research, and presenting your oral case. You may be expected to practice other skills, such as witness preparation, as well.

Legal writing and research methods

A legal research and writing (LRW) course provides an in-depth look at standard techniques of legal research, and skills needed for writing such as legal analysis, finding case law, and constructing a legal argument. Legal writing, research, and communication are critical lawyering skills, so you can expect to complete plenty of course work in this area, which is likely to include:

• Appellate briefs
• Mock pleadings
• Drafting exercises

How do courses prepare you to pass the bar exam?

Of course, all of your law school courses provide the logical reasoning and analytical skills to set you up to pass the bar exam. Courses on legal subject matter, such a Contracts, teach you the law you will need to answer questions on the bar exam. However, many schools also include a course specifically to help you with this test. For example, St. Francis offers General Bar Prep I and II courses, so once you complete your J.D. program, you’ll have already begun preparing to sit for the California Bar Exam .

Explore law school courses at St. Francis

Are you ready to tackle traditional or online law school? Find out what to expect by reviewing documentation at your top schools and learning about the prerequisites needed for law school. Although all law schools use a different educational approach, law school develops a wide variety of skills that can help you move onto your career’s next stage.

Learn more about our online Juris Doctor degree program.

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Course Overview

First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program

1 North   Griswold Hall 1525 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge ,  MA 02138

Before you begin your studies in the First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program (LRW), it will help you to situate the course in the broader context of your legal education and your future law practice. To follow is a brief overview of the program, and an introduction to several themes that will recur throughout the year.

Program Overview

LRW uses a series of writing, research, and advocacy projects to engage you in the process of legal reasoning. The course instructs you in basic methods of legal analysis, effective written and oral communication of your analysis, and essential legal research tools and methodologies.

The first semester of LRW focuses on the writing of two predictive memos, in which you assess the arguments on each side of the issue and predict which side would prevail.  In the spring, you will learn how to write an appellate brief, in which you present your client’s best arguments to a court. For all three assignments, you will produce both a draft and a final version, the better to respond to feedback and hone your writing and analysis.  In practice, as in LRW, the writing process will help you take your internal understanding of an issue and make it external, so that you may hold it at arm’s length and examine it critically. As novice lawyers become expert lawyers, they develop greater ability to monitor their own level of understanding, and may resort somewhat less frequently (although not infrequently) to a formal written product like a predictive memo. Nevertheless, even when they eschew a formal written memo, they continue to apply the same analytical steps that are required to complete the writing assignments you will undertake in this course.

Lawyers cannot provide effective representation unless they master the necessary research skills. At a minimum, lawyers must be able to find and update the constitutional provisions, statutes, regulations, and cases that determine their clients’ rights and obligations. To that end, the legal research component of LRW will introduce you to core tools and methodologies that will be essential in your internships next summer, as well as in your future law practice. Indeed, without such skills you will have a difficult time satisfying your employers and competing with fellow students in summer practice and the early years of law practice. More advanced research instruction is available in upper-level elective courses.

LRW’s learning model depends on the substantial feedback that we provide on your work. LRW will likely be the first law school course in which you receive any feedback on written work, and it will be the course in which you receive the most individual feedback by far. Keep in mind that our goals for your achievement are quite high, in keeping with your potential. Our feedback will naturally focus on areas for improvement, so you ought not interpret this emphasis negatively. Our feedback is intended not to discourage you, but to facilitate your learning.

LRW meets weekly in the fall and spring semester of your first year. LRW is graded Honors, Pass, Low Pass, and  Fail.

In the fall semester, you will complete two major writing assignments. The first is a  “Closed Memo,” in which you write a predictive memo based on a set of research materials that are provided for you. The second is an “Open Memo,” in which you must research the applicable law and write a predictive memo based on your own research.

In the spring semester, the major course assignment is the First-Year Ames Moot Court Program. Working in pairs, you will research and draft an appellate brief concerning a simulated case set in a federal or state appeals court. At the end of the semester, you will argue your case before a three-judge panel. Judges are drawn from Harvard Law School faculty, practicing lawyers, and upper-level law students. With this course overview in mind, we turn next to a discussion of several recurring themes in LRW.

The Conventions of Legal Discourse

Any discourse community has its own discourse conventions, and lawyers have done a particularly thorough job of developing theirs. LRW is intended to familiarize you with these discourse conventions.

LRW introduces you to the generally accepted modes of legal reasoning: rule-based reasoning; analogical reasoning; and policy reasoning. As you progress through the course assignments, you will see the interdependence among these three modes of legal reasoning. When LRW turns to advocacy, you will learn how lawyers use narrative devices to complement the conventional modes of legal reasoning and make their arguments more persuasive.

Discourse conventions govern not only the modes of argument, but also the authorities that frame the argument. You will learn what types of materials constitute acceptable sources of authority in legal discourse, as well as the different hierarchies within which those authorities exist.

Most concretely, LRW will introduce you to two basic forms through which lawyers communicate their legal reasoning. You will learn the conventions applicable to a predictive memo and an appellate oral argument.

Of course, you will be learning the conventions of legal discourse in all of your first-year courses, indeed in all of law school. LRW, however, is intended to focus very specifically on the conventions themselves, more so than in your other courses.

Legal Reasoning and Judicial Discretion

Throughout your legal education, you will encounter a debate over the role of judicial discretion in adjudication. At the extremes, some would suggest that adjudication is rationally constrained by the available legal authorities, while others would argue that adjudication is effectively constrained only by the judge’s own beliefs and values. LRW is not intended to resolve that debate. Nevertheless, your work in this course should illustrate several different concepts about the degrees to which legal authorities can constrain judicial discretion.

Over the course of the year’s projects, you should see that a series of authorities applying the same rule can restrict–at least to some degree–the decision in a future situation governed by that rule. For example, if a statute says “No vehicles in the park,” and the state’s highest court interprets the statute to mean no “motor vehicles,” you can be pretty sure that the statute won’t prohibit you from riding your elephant through the park.

One might think that the ever-increasing number of decisions necessarily increases the degree of constraint. That may be so in some situations, but several factors can have a destabilizing influence. One such factor is the contingent nature of language. You may have seen in other contexts, and you will surely see in your legal career, that saying more about a topic often creates more uncertainty, not less. Each new opinion creates the potential for misstatement and misunderstanding, enabling future lawyers to reinterpret the pre-existing rule. A second destabilizing factor is the social context of our legal system. Authorities rest on a foundation of policy, of societal goals and values, even if those values are not always stated explicitly. As societal goals and values shift, a body of law resting on the discarded goals and values may become obsolete, and eventually reoriented in support of a new rule.

Finally, you should recognize that the limits on judicial discretion are often less substantial than they might seem at first. Each of the major projects in LRW should demonstrate that, with regard to a given legal problem, there is usually more than one possible outcome, even if one outcome seems more likely than the others. Skilled lawyers read authorities with a critical eye, constantly on the lookout for the gap of ambiguity within a seemingly solid wall of legal authorities.

Tension Between the Abstract and the Concrete

To complete any substantial task of legal analysis, the lawyer must at some point bridge the boundary between the abstract and the concrete. Rules rarely, if ever, cover every situation imaginable. For example, the “No vehicles in the park” statute could simply list every make and model of car and truck in existence, to clarify that they are all prohibited from the park. But the rule would be unmanageably long, and new makes and models would come into existence after the rule’s enactment. So the drafters would instead choose a term to describe the category of situations to which their rule was addressed. Rules that denote categories rather than specific situations necessarily involve a degree of abstraction, whether a moderate degree (e.g., “motor vehicle”) or a substantial degree (e.g., “best interest of the child”).

Fortunately for us, this inherent uncertainty is one of the things that makes law practice a creative endeavor. For example, if the vehicles in the park statute referred to “motor vehicles,” would that include airplanes? Mopeds? Golf carts? The “Segway” personal scooters? Lawyers and judges would try to use the policies underlying the rule and analogies to prior decisions to decide each example. But the jump from abstract to concrete would involve a measure of uncertainty, and it is this uncertainty that allows lawyers to make plausible arguments on both sides of a case.

Your Audience

In the oral and written communications that you undertake in this course, you must focus not only on the substantive ideas that you try to communicate, but also on the way in which your audience will receive those ideas. Communication is a two-step process, and even brilliant arguments suffer if the audience is distracted by substandard prose. That is why the feedback in this course will consider the form and style of your writing.

Additionally, you must recognize that your audience has a particular task before it, and will be using your communication (i.e., your memo, brief, or oral argument) as an instrument in completing that task. The audience’s task will often be to decide how to advise a client or rule in a case. To be effective, your communication must be suited to your audience’s needs. So in a memo addressed to an attorney who must decide how to advise a client, simply stating your prediction is not enough. You must also help the attorney understand the applicable legal standard and its likely application, as well as any plausible counter-arguments and the reasons why those arguments would not prevail. Only then will your communication allow the attorney to make an informed decision about how to advise the client.

You are at the start of a fascinating journey. We in the First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program wish you great success and enjoyment as you begin your legal education.

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Law School: 12 Things Family and Friends Need to Know

Last Updated: Aug 28, 2024

Makenzie Way, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Everyone knows law school is stressful.

But for a law student, it can be difficult to describe how the strains of law school impact your ability to connect with their non-law school friends and family. Often times we suppress our frustrations because we don’t want to insult or be rude to the people we care about. Try as we might, every law student has caught themselves wishing that their non-law school companions understood certain facets of the law student life. To that end, I’ve compiled twelve of the most common things my peers wish their friends knew about their law school life.

• Sleep is hard to come by so it’s not unusual for us to prioritize sleep over going out.
• It’s not abnormal to have an offer (or a job) after your first or second year.
• Exam prep does not last a few mere hours, it requires literal days of hard work.
• Just because we don’t have an assignment due doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of work. In fact, readings can be worse than assignments.
• On the topic of readings, it can take multiple hours to complete a reading for one class because of the complexity of the subject matter. So we’re not lying when we say our entire Saturday is being spent prepping for class.
• Non-class time is not necessarily free time. We have pro bono requirements, board meetings, journal meetings, assignments, etc.
• When we visit home we do want to see you, but it may not be feasible since we often have important school work, assignments, and other tasks to complete. Likewise, because law school often requires a sacrifice in the sleep department, sometimes our bodies are telling us to use our break to rest and recharge.
• Being a law student doesn’t mean we have the time, or the experience, to solve all of your legal problems.

• Law school is expensive! Sometimes we can’t financially afford to attend all the events or dinners that you invite us to, so please don’t read anything into our rejection.
• In the majority of our courses grades are based on one final exam or assignment, and to make matters worse, we’re graded on a curve – meaning someone has to get a B- while someone else has to get an A. Furthermore, getting good grades is crucial for obtaining decent clerkships and post-graduation jobs.
• And finally, the law school workload is  not at all  comparable to the workload of undergrad, or even the average MBA. In our opinion, the law school workload and expected standard of achievement is much, much higher!

Remember, this is a list of what I think are the most common things we wish our friends and family knew about law school. There are many more things we could add, but just remember, the next time your friends or family give you a hard time for being unavailable, you can send them this list.

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