The Reasonably Prudent Law Student

I promised newly minted law student @SohanaB that I would do a post about supplements. The books that my law school put on the summer reading list for orientation weren’t all that great, so I selected some outside sources and soon learned that in addition to buying those thick casebooks, I’d need supplements. Lots of supplements. In print, audio, video, and flashcard form.

Personally, I’m not a fan of audio or video for schoolwork, and flashcards are kind of a fall-back, so I stuck with print and I’m happy to share what I think are the better supplements for each 1L subject. When you’re planning out your budget, do remember to set aside some extra money to buy these, because you WILL need them. And as I’ve suggested for casebooks: forget your school bookstore and Barnes, and head to Ebay or Half.com for the supplements. It’ll leave a smaller dent in your savings account and you’ll be glad for it.

That’s me with most (not all!) of the supplements I used during my 1L sentence. Can you see why I’m miserable? ;-)

But in all seriousness, supplements are a great help to the beleaguered law student.

Don’t make the mistake of cracking open your casebooks for the first time and expecting it to have neat little flowcharts and diagrams and pictures and bolded definitions in the margins, all those formalistic tricks that helped you out in high school and undergrad.

Your Casebooks Are Not Your Friends

Your cases will be stark. They will contain reprints of cases dating as far back as the 18th century, and if you’re unlucky, like I was, they will be printed on very thin, very yellow paper through which your highlighters and even your pencils will bleed.

(“But graphite doesn’t bleed, Huma,” you’ll say. Strange things happen in law school, children. Strange, unspeakable things.)

You + Supplements = BFF4EVA

Supplements can mean books that contain comprehensive outlines (@lawschoolninja requested a post called Outlining 101, so be on the lookout for that at some point in the future) or books that contain explanations and sample problems…or both!

They’re incredibly helpful and cater to all sorts of different learning styles. If you’re a visual learner and like charts and diagrams and flow charts, there’s a brand of supplements that helps with that. (Emmanuel is pretty good about that, as is the E&E series.) If you like stark, easy-to-follow outlines, there’s a brand for that. (Gilbert’s, hands down.) If you like mnemonics and quick-spit rules laid out for you, there’s even a brand for that. (Blond’s, I’d have to say.)

Free Supplements That Aren’t Really Free

First, there are the supplements that you’ll receive for free. Well, not for free, really. You’ll get them if you sign up to lock in your price for a Barbri or PMBR or Kaplan Bar Review course. These are going to be thick books that contain explanations and sample test problems (usually multiple choice) for a lot of 1L subjects like Property and Constitutional Law.

They’ll also have good flow charts and diagrams and checklists that can only help you in your quest to get the material down. If you want to sign up for a bar review course as a 1L and lock your price in, go ahead. You’ll get the book as a little gift. If you don’t feel like it, try to work out a way to get someone who has the book into your study group. One of the guys in my Property study group had the Barbri book, so he ended up bringing it to our sessions and it was pretty helpful when it was time to just crank through problems and get our exam techniques on.

EEEEEE!! The E&Es!!

A great series of supplements is known simply as the E&E. It stands for “Examples and Explanations” and there’s a book available for most of the 1L courses as well as the ones tested on the Barzam (like Secured Transactions, etc) and even others for courses like Tax Law, etc.

This is a fabulous series and I highly recommend picking up an E&E for each of your 1L courses. Don’t worry about not getting the newest edition; they don’t change that much. Our CivPro professor worked the 6th edition E&E into our syllabus, and I had already purchased the 4th edition over winter break, but I was able to follow along just fine and had almost all of the sample problems that fell in the reading sections.

The E&Es are set up in chapter form, with each chapter broken off into sub-headings and explanations. The writing is not at all pretentious or filled with $10 words (I’m looking at you, casebooks!). It’s larger print (a welcome reprieve for your eyes, trust me), clean font, and good, solid explanations broken off in easy-to-digest headings with cute diagrams and tables. Each chapter ends with a series of Examples that are usually word problems, and usually with multiple parts.

The word problems tell little stories and this really helps me personally because I can just conceptualize it better, rather than, “Plaintiff A, a resident of the Eastern District of West Virginia, gets into a car accident with Pliaintiffs B, a resident of the Northern District of South Dakota, and C, a resident of the Southern District of North Dakota. The accident took place in the Central District of Wyoming.”

Ugh. No, thank you. I much prefer the way the E&E does it, and I think you might, too. After about 10-15 such examples come the explanations. These are detailed explanations, often broken into paragraphs, that not only give the correct answer and explain why it’s correct, but also illustrate why the incorrect answers are incorrect. The only complaint I have is that the writing in the Explanations gets clunky: the writers will start off with an incorrect answer and explain the logic behind it in such a way that will convince you it’s correct, and by the time you read the explanation for the actual correct answer, you’re all confuddled because they sold the first option to you so well.

But on the other hand, that kind of second-guessing and being able to spot why something is almost correct but not correct-correct can only help you, since the writers of the Barzam are notorious for including slip-ups like that. It’s because they weren’t hugged enough as children.

So, if you can, seriously consider picking up an E&E for your 1L courses, at least. You’ll see me with several in the picture: they’re the cream-colored books with the color-coded bars on the spine. Sad part is, that wasn’t even all my E&Es. I think I was missing Property and CivPro. They’re very, very helpful and some professors, like my CivPro, obvious think they’re so helpful that they incorporate them into class syllabi.

Not Just Another Dumb Blond

Before I knew much about supplements, I went out and bought (okay, stayed in and bought since I’m such an online shopping freak) a couple Blond’s supplements. I bought one for Torts and one for Contracts. The Torts one was incredibly helpful. The Contracts one was a different story, but that wasn’t Blond’s fault. My K prof during first semester used the book he’d written, and none of the supplements matched up to that. He had different terms he wanted us to use, different things he wanted us to pay close attention to, so I didn’t end up really using the supplement except as a quick flip-through brain reviver before finals. Second semester, our prof gave us the outlines she wanted us to use. They were AWESOME. So I basically just used Blond’s to brush up on the Parol Evidence Rule since I wanted to be sure to have that down cold. (And it wasn’t even tested that heavily on the exam in the end. Go figure.)

Anyway, the Torts one was extremely helpful, and I’m glad I bought it. Our Torts class was kind of a horse of a different color. The professor wanted to get down to the bare bones of the rule (which he often did, don’t get me wrong) but the problem was that he entertained every single ridiculous hypothetical posed by students along the way. Every single one. And there were some pretty bad ones. (It didn’t compare to our CrimLaw class, though. Ho boy. A blog post for another time.)

Each Blond’s book starts off with a whole bunch of charts. For Torts, one such chart was titled, General Torts. It then split off into Intentional and Negligent. The intentional part was broken off into the five intentional torts, and same for the negligent heading. The next chart might have broken down the elements of the five intentional torts further, and so on.

After the charts, you’ll see chapter headings based on general topics. It’s broken down in outline form with handy mnemonics (mnemonics are also included in the charts) to help you remember the elements of different torts. After that, you’ll see a list of cases, the ones most often used in the popular casebooks, with a very general statement of the facts (2-3 sentences to jog your memory), the issue, and the rule.

Flipping through the Blond’s supplement is a great way to jog your memory. Shortly before the final, when I’d put everything else away, I tested myself by flipping through and checking out issue statements and then replying with the rule in those cases. It’s a great way to review and make sure you’ve hit the points you need to understand.

Don’t be fooled by their appearance: these are slim, unassuming black books that are relatively inexpensive, but I’d recommend getting them for subjects that are more case-based, like Torts or Contracts or Crim, as opposed to subjects that are trickier and involve tons of minority rules and state rules and just psycho random garbage (like Property…which ironically ended up being my absolute favorite subject ever. Go figure, right?).

Emmanuel’s Manuals

Emmanuel’s are the big name in supplements, or so I’ve been told. They’re thick, huge books that will run you a little more than the others.

I’m not too sold on Emmanuels, personally. Maybe it’s because by the time I got mine, I’d already developed considerable brand loyalty to E&E and somewhat to Blond’s. I got mine for pretty cheap, though, about $5 for Contracts and Property combined at a used book sale in the library.

They’ve got good, solid stuff, don’t get me wrong. A couple friends swear by Emmanuel’s. But I was already getting what I needed from the other supplements, so I didn’t really have as much of an incentive to take them seriously.

My advice: don’t take my word on Emmanuels. (Take my word on everything else, though. ;-) Ha ha.) If you find one at the bookstore, take the time to flip through it and make your own decision as to how helpful it will be. I’d hate to turn any of you off of Emmanuel’s for no reason other than I had personally found something more helpful prior to buying mine.

Who’s Reading Gilbert Grape?

I am, that’s for sure!

Gilbert’s supplements are just as thick and big as Emmanuels. And I personally SWEAR by them. They are different from the E&Es in that they don’t have any sample problems and are written in all-outline form.

For me, the most effective practice was to get a Gilbert’s and an E&E for each class I felt I’d need the help in. I would go through the Gilbert’s and make sure I knew the intricacies of the rules (it outlines majority positions and minority positions and state models and lists every single exception to the rule that you could possibly come up with, every additional scenario you might somehow need to know) and then I’d go to the E&E and brush up on the general topic really quickly before moving on to the examples.

I can say with full certainty that the Gilbert’s Property law guide SAVED MY BUTT. My Property class was a nightmare. My notes were a nightmare. (Not my fault: the professor talked so fast and spit out so much information that almost all of us just abandoned the outline form of note-taking and simply took dictation, with little prospects of being able to clean it up later.)

But in the weeks leading up to the exam, I committed myself to Gilbert’s and saw great results. I beefed up my outline with theirs, I paid special attention to their “Exam Taking Tips” that appear in every section, and I just reviewed, reviewed, reviewed. And then I read through the explanations in E&E again, and did some sample problems.

And it paid off big time because I got an A in the class after about 16 weeks of wanting to be shot in the face.

I went with Gilbert’s again next semester for Constitutional Law, which really paid off, too. I used it to study for the class and write class assignments based on essay prompts the professor would hand out, and it really helped me understand the material.

Bottom line: Go with Gilbert’s! You won’t be sorry! They’re pretty much the best supplements I’ve ever come across. (It should be noted, though, that comparing Gilbert’s and E&Es is somewhat like comparing apples and oranges. Both serve different and equally useful purposes.)

Other Supplements (the ones that don’t even warrant a clever title)

In the picture, you’ll see that there are some other supplements aside from Gilbert’s, E&E, Emmanuel, and Blond. I think I have a Primer on Real Law and some sort of Crim Law primer. These were professor-recommended and were awful. I might devote another blog post to this, but…yeah. Not very helpful at all. Waste of money. The property one was well-meaning but had several GLARING errors that just undermined my confidence in the whole thing. The Crim one would have been good had my professor not rejected half the things in it and taught his own way. (The parts he didn’t reject were good, though; good, solid explanations with examples.)

Gah, way to drop the ball, professors.

Readers’ Suggestions

(Got one? Leave it in the comments and I’ll edit it in!)

RabbiFink suggests Siegel’s essay exam books, available on Amazon and in the school bookstore. The essays are similar to the exams you’ll be taking, and the books explain what each essay covers in the Table of Contents, so if you needed help on a particular topic, you’d look it up in the TOC and find the pertinent essays. Siegel’s contains exam-taking tips and a multiple-choice section with explanations of right and wrong answers.

(Sounds pretty helpful! I may have to check these out for next year! Thank you!)

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My friend Adam highly recommends the Law in Flash series of flashcards for understanding concepts and practicing with hypotheticals. He adds, “Another nice thing about them is they have some zany names and situations which make them easy to remember.” The cool thing is you can buy them as flash cards or buy the digital version for your iPhone.

He also recommends the Emmanuel CrunchTime series in audio format, which is an audio book cycle that you can listen to when you’re out and about. For those of us with commutes, they’d be pretty helpful.

That’s what’s out there in the digital/audio/flashcard law school media, for those of you that want to check that out. :)

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Hopefully, this post will help you navigate through the sea of printed law school supplements. Like I said, I’m not a fan of video/audio materials, or flashcards, so you’re on your own there. But happy trails and good luck!