modern acropolis

Since I got the law library, I’ve had the opportunity to view and use a lot of the third party study aids for free. I realized when Bill asked me about which I liked that I’m kind of an amatuer expert on the subject.

Should I use 3d party books?

Yes. For a few reasons. First, it provides you a different perspective than your professor. No matter how smart your professor is, it will always be helpful to get another view of the law. After all, each judge interprets it and eventually you too will need to have your own understanding and be able to support it. Second, it saves you a lot of time. I’ll detail that more later, but it’s a lot quicker to read a 3d party book to understand your case assigments than to re-read the casebook again. Finally, why not? It’s another way to increase your learning and if you want good grades, I would strongly recommend it.

Some people may disagree with this but it worked for me.

Onto the review: (All links are to the Torts version but each series has one for each 1L course)

The Best Commercial Outline

The Gilbert’s Series: This is very easy to read and simple. I found that each book had at least some of every section I learned in classes. It saved a ton of time when I outlined because I often used this as my sketchy organization and then beefed it up as I saw fit.

The Emanuel’s series sucks. It just made the whole thing more complicated and didn’t make much sense to me how it chose to organize the subject matters.
In a Nut Shell series are so simple that I felt like they were premised on the idea that you did no reading for class and were choosing instead to “cram” the night before the barest bones of the law you could. Also, I would be very embarrassed to be seen in public with those books.

Best Casenotes

Casenotes Legal Briefs series: These books have a great summation of the case facts and follow a very uniform pattern for each case. There is also a definitions section for the legalise you might not know from the cases. It has a great added bonus. You can mail in a card and the USBN of the book and get access to the online database of these documents. From there, you can cut and paste from the casenotes into your own outline. Saves a ton of time. These are adapted to all the major casebooks so be sure you get one that is keyed to your specific book.

I did not like Legalines. These are more sophmoric and seemed more random to me. I also thought that the conclusions of law sections were poorly done compared to the Casenotes. Also, no free pasting into your Word outlines either.

Best Hornbook

Generally, these are pretty useless, in my opinion, for your 1L courses. They just complicate matters and introduce nuances of the law that you never need to know. I did think that the Understanding series Criminal and Torts books were useful, however.

As to the Understanding Property and Contracts law, STAY AWAY. Those books made the subjects much harder and were quite useless.

Best Book You Must Have

The Examples and Explanations series is a must-have. It is like it says, examples for you to work thru and explanations. It’s great to help you spot issues because it’s isolates them for you. It also gives you great answers that you wish you’d thought of. I used this and enjoyed it for every class but property (which was only because my prof was kind of eccentric on how he wanted us to learn the law).

Comment if you have a subject for my next “Soapbox: 1L Advice” series that you’d like to know about. Coming soon: General outlining/study strategies.