This podcast explains the difference between case briefing, class note-taking, smaller writing assignments, and exam essay-writing. It’s a podcast that emphasizes exam strategy as beginning early with practice exam-writing, offers encouragement and thought exercises on overcoming self-resistance to practice, and describes how to use practice as a tool to conquer “freezing” on finals.
This lesson will teach you the best ways to prepare for exams, and the best ways to organize your response on the day of your exam.
This lesson teaches you why, when and how to create outlines when preparing for your law school exams.
This podcast discusses why outlining in law school should really be called synthesizing, and gives tips to help you outline (or synthesize!) more effectively.
This lesson will cover the basic structure of written legal analysis: IRAC. IRAC stands for Issue, Rule, Application/Analysis, Conclusion. There are slightly different versions of IRAC which may be used for different legal documents. This lesson will focus on IRAC for essay exam writing. Some faculty may prefer CRAC, or CIRAC, where the conclusion is placed first. You may also learn CRREAC for writing legal memos and briefs, which stands for Conclusion, Rule, Rule Explanation, Application, Conclusion.
Creating Study Aids is part of the Academic Support series of CALI Lessons. This lesson introduces you to law school study aids. It begins with a brief overview of self-regulated learning and Bloom's learning taxonomy. Then, the lesson introduces law school study aids by pairing them with learning objectives at each level of the taxonomy. Finally, the lesson concludes with an activity designed to help you reflect on your learning. It can be used as an introduction, supplement, or as review.
In this lesson, we will provide some steps you can follow to improve your reading comprehension.
This lesson explores one of the fundamental lawyering skills, which is to be able to spot issues. This lesson looks at what an issue is, and best practices in spotting them in cases, with clients, and on exams. Students will go through basic issue spotting exercises to better prepare for exams.
Law students often hear about the importance of "doing hypos" but don't know why they are important, where to find them, how to do them, and so on. This lesson will cover the what, why, when, where, and how of hypos so law students can conquer the material they are learning and be prepared for exams.
First-year law students often understand the law and know the right conclusion, but struggle to apply the law thoroughly in order to maximize their scores. This lesson is designed to help law students who may have received feedback that their analysis is conclusory.
Have you ever compared your essay to a sample answer, or one with a higher grade, and wondered what was different about yours? Especially if you seemed to use all the correct law? It's likely that you aren't using your facts enough!
This lesson will explain why it's important that you use your facts, as well as help you to do just that!
This lesson helps students understand where cases fit in a final exam answer and develop arguments based on cases. Students' exam arguments should improve using this lesson's techniques.
This lesson also includes video commentary from the author that expands on the material in the lesson.