Introduction to Reading in Law School Ante-Law School Camp session 1

The Department of Academic Achievement Chelsea Baldwin, JD ’09 ◦ Assistant Director of Academic Achievement ◦ Study for Success programs for 1L and 2L students Steven Foster, JD ’08 ◦ Director of Academic Achievement ◦ Conquer the Bar programs for 3L students & graduates

WebEx features Content pane Participant pane ◦ Provide feedback to the presenter, see who else is attending the program ◦ Raise your hand so I can let you speak Chat pane ◦ Chat room for participants Q&A pane ◦ Put your questions in the queue to be answered during or at the end of the program Polling ◦ I’ll be using this feature occasionally to check in with you about the content of the program

Law School – First Year Overview Language oriented curriculum & profession ◦ In-depth analysis of the meaning of the words  Definitional  Grammatical usage  Modification through relationships with other words in a sentence 1 st semester ◦ Orientation & Legal Analysis (week 1) ◦ Torts, Contracts I, Legal Research & Writing I, Civil Procedure I 2 nd semester ◦ Property, Contracts II, Legal Research & Writing II, Civil Procedure II, Criminal Law/Procedure ◦ Appellate brief & oral arguments

Expertise Per Anders Ericsson* ◦ EXPERTISE refers to the mechanisms underlying the superior achievement of an expert, i.e. "one who has acquired special skill in or knowledge of a particular subject through professional training and practical experience" (Webster's dictionary, 1976, p. 800). ◦ BUT, EXPERTISE IS DOMAIN SPECIFIC ◦ * Editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

Domain* Most generally, domain knowledge is that knowledge used to refer to an area of human endeavor... or other specialized discipline.knowledge Specialists and experts use and develop their own domain knowledge. Specialists and experts ◦ Lawyers (Law) ◦ Doctors (Medicine) ◦ Computer Programmers (Programming languages and architecture) ◦ Social Scientists If the concept domain knowledge or domain expert is used we emphasize a specific domain which is an object of the discourse/interest/problem. *

Schema Per McKinney, “[S]chema is a cluster of information that we hold in our mind about a subject.” Schemas are “critical building blocks of the human cognitive process.”* ◦ The case brief is an effective tool to help beginning students organize a legal opinion in a way that enhances understanding and makes the information manageable to the student. ◦ By going through the process of drafting a case brief, students free up their short term memory which allows them to think about what the case actually means. * Leah M. Christensen. The Psychology Behind Case Briefing: A Powerful Cognitive Schema. 29 C AMP. L. R EV. 5 (2006).

Reading in the Legal Domain Understanding the basic contents of judicial opinions (a/k/a cases) Layout ◦ Caption  Names of parties in original lawsuit  The official reporter in which the case can be found  From this you can generally infer the jurisdiction and the deciding body that determined the outcome of the case  Date opinion was published ◦ Deciding or Authoring Judge ◦ Body {general conventions but no hard and fast rules for the ordering of the elements that are found in the body of the opinion}  Description of how the dispute found itself in this court (procedural history)  The story of how the dispute arose between the parties (facts)  The nature of the dispute, i.e., what question(s) must the court decide the legal answer to (issue)  The answer that the court has come up with for the question (holding)  The reasoning the court used to reach that answer to the question  Disposition

Case Briefing A schema to help you extract the important details from a case ◦ Also promotes active thinking re: the contents of the case McKinney’s recommended form ◦ Case heading (name, date, place & court of decision, page # in casebook) ◦ Parties’ names ◦ Procedural History ◦ Facts ◦ Issue or Question Presented ◦ Holding ◦ Reasoning/Rationale ◦ Your Thoughts Some professors recommend creating a section to segregated the dicta from the holding/reasoning of the case

Chapter 1 Exercises Discourse Community examples: Is this a sub-community of a larger discourse community? Are there sub-communities within your immediate discourse community? Name three vocabulary words that might have a special meaning within your community: How would you help bring a novice into this discourse community? Looking to the future, do you expect your methods to be used by your law school professors as you work at becoming a member of the legal discourse community? Why is reading important to becoming a member of this discourse community?

Chapter 2 Exercises Is this an edited or an unedited case? How can you tell? In what geographic region was this case decided? How do you know? What was the general view of smoking as a health issue at the time this opinion was written? How do you know? Write brief on separate page or in separate document. What was the most difficult part of writing that brief for you? What made writing that part of the brief difficult? Evaluate against sample brief provided on p.30 of Reading Like a Lawyer

Next Week Sampling of the types of reasoning encountered in judicial opinions and that you will use as you craft arguments Previewing the “steps” that will help you become an expert reader sooner rather than later Additional details provided about the “self-regulated learning” cycle

Resources Michael Hunter Schwartz, Expert Learning for Law Students Geoff Colvin, Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else Ruth Ann McKinney, Reading Like a Lawyer: Time-Saving Strategies for Reading Law Like an Expert Leah M. Christensen, assorted articles