Outlines
In law school, you are told repeatedly that you must make outlines for your courses. An outline should include the material you learn for each course, assembled into some logical sequence so that you can grasp the course as a whole and understand how the individual cases you study work together. There are commercial outlines, but we are warned to avoid these. Logically, that makes sense as it is in the process of developing your outline that your repeatedly process the material and, thus, learn it. Just reading over a pre-made outline probably wouldn’t help, much.
The problem for me is that I have never been an outliner. I never use them when I am writing–never have. I remember in my first quarter of undergrad I had a professor who said that we had to write a short paper and that the outlines would be due in a week, “You are not required to write an outline, but I have never had a student get an A on this project without doing the outline.” I skipped the outline and when he handed back the final papers he said “Once again, those who did not write an outline did not get an A.” I looked down at my paper, saw a bright red A, and lifted my hand. “You don’t count,” he said, jokingly.
This reinforced my “I don’t do outlines” attitude and I made it through undergrad and grad school without a single outline.
Now, however, I am giving them a shot. I spent a good part of today starting my course outlines. I’m using OmniOutliner which is a Mac app that is very user-friendly. I can attach my briefs to the outlines, even, which is very helpful. I have good starts on Property and Criminal, an the slightest framework for Contracts. CivPro, however, eludes me as yet. I don’t feel like we have covered enough material to know how to organize it all…yet.
Speaking of CivPro, after class on Friday I heard several of my classmates saying how they felt lost or like they were really struggling in that class. Me, I love it. My two favorite classes are Contracts and Civ Pro because I feel like there is always something more about each case to understand–lots of twists and the back stories are interesting. It takes a lot more work to prepare for class and some of the rules are written in the most obscure English so that I feel like I’m looking up every-other word, but it’s still fascinating to me.
Property runs in third position and Criminal is my least favorite of the substantive courses. Property has some interesting bits, but Criminal is much more black-and-white–here are the elements, did the accused cover all the elements, if so then s/he’s guilty. Ho-hum. Legal Skills is my least favorite class of all–I feel like it’s a lot of babying and hand-holding for stuff we should be able to pick up pretty easily. I mean, how many times can we be told that we have to be careful to follow the rules when we cite and that those rules are all in the Bluebook. Yeah, I get it already… can I go read my CivPro? No, I have to do exercises in the library comparing the opinions in official reporters and unofficial ones and identifying where in the library one can find the Pacific Reporter. Feels like kindergarten work–what, next will we be coloring in a line drawing of a digest? Yawn.
Anyway, when my classmates were bemoaning CivPro, I expressed my enjoyment of it. You’d have thought I said “I like to put babies on giant spikes,” they way people stared at me. People seemed really surprised, but I took that as a good thing. Besides, it’s okay if they think I’m weird, I know I’m a big geek.