The Law School Playbook

At the risk of sounding like a nagging parent, I implore you to please read for class—it is not optional. I know if you had your druthers, you’d mark every assignment on your syllabi with “TL; DR,” for “too long, didn’t read,” especially in the busiest year of your academic life. However, you are overlooking the critical fact that reading is what lawyers get paid to do.

My goal is not only to change if you read but also how you read for law school. For instance, you may be reading for class because you don’t want to be embarrassed if you are called on or want to cross the assignment off your always-growing “to do” list. When reading experts instruct you to read with a clear purpose, however, that’s not what they have in mind.

If you find yourself just getting through your reading assignments, you’re not alone. The good news is that there are easy strategies that take no additional time but will ensure you’ll get a lot more out of your reading. One of those strategies involves finding your inner actor.

Law students, particularly in their first year, look for truth in the cases that they read. Even second-year law students likely figure that the judge knows much more about a given topic than they do, so they read cases to see what they can learn.

There is no question that time is the elephant in the room throughout the entire law school experience—there just isn’t enough of it. All law students struggle with time management, even those that are high achieving and well organized. The phrase “time matters” is not just relevant in law school. Indeed, LexisNexis aptly named its law practice management software “Time Matters,” which is a reminder that there typically isn’t much of it after you graduate either.

We have discussed numerous strategies that can prompt you to be an engaged, critical thinker while reading. It is important for you to recognize, however, that your willingness to continually monitor your own thoughts and assess your own understanding as you read is essential to you becoming an expert reader. You must choose to engage in a disciplined analysis of the text, making connections between ideas and considering numerous perspectives. Stated simply, it is up to you to engage in the metacognition—thinking about your thinking—as you work through cases. Being able to recognize the reading strategies available to you may help with that process.

The law school experience is so focused on reading and interpreting appellate cases that students sometimes overlook the central role that legislation plays in practice. The reading and interpretation strategies in this series of episodes pertains to many kinds of enacted law (or requirements with the force of enacted law), such as statutes, regulations, ordinances, and municipal law. For ease of reference, however, I will refer to the coaching strategies in this series as reading and interpreting statutes.

So today, our work of reading and interpreting statutes continues. After the first step—slowing down—the next step is to determine how the statute fits into the big picture. As you learned with case reading, background knowledge, even if acquired just prior to reading the text, makes you a better, more efficient reader. To put the statute in context, take the time to look at the table of contents. Look at the surrounding sections to see how the statute fits into the big picture.

Today, we are picking up our ongoing discussion of reading and interpreting statutes. We will discuss the final step in this episode, which is to resolve ambiguities or to add clarity to vague language.

We are going to pick up where we left off in the last episode, where a commercial airline pilot named Sean Fitzgerald showed up for work “rip-roaring drunk” and engaged in pre-flight work before he was arrested. The statute he is alleged to have violated is 18 U.S.C. § 343, and we are now at step 3, which requires us to look at the language of the statute itself and methodically break it down.

Today we will begin our discussion of legal analysis. We have all heard it time and time again: the purpose of law school is to train you to “think law a lawyer.” As the infamous Professor Kingsfield told his students in the 1973 film The Paper Chase, you come to law school “with a skull full a mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer.” But what does that mean exactly? Do lawyers really think different than other people? What does it mean to “think like a lawyer”? And, for that matter, what is legal reasoning?

It’s so difficult for me to believe that I started law school almost 25 years ago. There are a lot of things I don’t remember about 25 years ago, but what I do remember well are the many things I didn’t know when I entered law school. Policy was one of those things. None of my professors talked about policy directly, in the sense of explaining what they actually meant when they were talking about it. Instead, policy was just something that came up every once in a while as students responded to questioning under the Socratic method. Well, eventually I figured out that policy is the purpose or reason behind a rule.