OUTLINES

One question that sooner or later pops into the minds of first semester law students is when to begin studying for finals. The answer is one month after school begins when you start preparing your outline.

Crazy? Ridiculous? Unrealistic? It's not.

Don't know what an outline is. You soon will.

A law school outline is a summary of the information that a professor has reviewed in a particular course for the semester. Outlines are developed by the students themselves to study for final exams, and contain summaries of the cases and the law that the professor reviewed for the semester. Outlines help students understand how the law for a particular subject flowed from day 1 until the end of the semester. Many professors allow students to use outlines on final exams to answer questions.

From the moment you get to law school you will begin to review case law in each of the first semester doctrinal courses of Contracts, Criminal Law, Civil Procedure and Torts. By the time finals roll around you will have easily reviewed between 50 and 100 cases in each course.

As you can see we are taking about a whole lot of cases, and outlines are often 30 pages long or more for each class. Drafting these documents can take a significant amount of time, and quite often the semester's reading week is not enough time to draft outlines for each class. So the best way to draft outlines is from early in your law school career.

Second and third-year law students have outlines for courses. If they give you their outlines take them so that you can get a better grasp of how to perform an outline. It is important that you get an outline from someone who you trust and just not any student.

Below are a couple of websites that provide law school outlines.

http://www.ilrg.com/students/outlines/
http://stu.findlaw.com/outlines/

Other related articles on this website include Case Briefing and First Semester-A Roadmap.

Good luck with the outlines!

Michael Santana
michael.santana@lawboost.com

If you have any questions or comments about this article, or want to write your own article about the pre-law or law school process, feel free to contact me.