 Hello, I'm Professor Vanille Urundel and we're going to talk about starting your course summaries early. Now, you may have heard the term outlines, but we don't want to confuse what you're going to do with commercial outlines, with outlines prepared by other students. The course summary is something you have to do for yourself in order to help your learning and facilitate your learning. And the process is an ongoing process that starts very early in the semester. So the reason to start the course, to do a summary is so that you can synthesize the essential information that you need for the course that you're taking. When you get someone else's outline that they've done, you are essentially using someone else's summary of the course they took. Even if it's taught by the same professor, there's many, many things that can be different in the course. The content can be different, the emphasis can be different. And if you use someone else's summary, you will make the mistake of either being both over-inclusive and under-inclusive in terms of material. More importantly though, the problem becomes is that it is the process of making a course summary that helps you understand the law and help you develop issue-spotting skills. And when you tell me that you have an outline by a student who made an A, what you're saying to me is that that student did the work, you shouldn't expect to make an A just because you have an outline made by someone who made an A. And even if the outline is perfect for the course they took, it can be fatally flawed in some ways for the course that you're taking. So you need to do your own summary. The other reason to do an outline is because the outline helps you to identify information you need to clarify. So as you do your summary and you don't understand things, then you can draw up questions and go in and talk to your faculty member. If you're having particularly difficult with a particular course, you may want to have a standing appointment to go in to see the professor of that course to talk about it. So doing the course summary helps you to establish a structure for your learning and around what it is you need to know and be able to do on the exam. You're going to organize your course outline not around the cases or around the class date but around theories, concepts, cause of actions, crimes, and our defenses. You're going to use the table of contents of your casebook and you're going to use commercial outlines to help you make sure that you have everything essential in your outline that you need. You can know one material, one no one item is going to have everything you need in order to do well on law school exams. However, you do want to be sure that you follow the order that your professor has provided. So you don't want to just take a table of contents or take, you don't want to just take the table of contents. You want to go by the order that your professor has established. Timing wise, you want to start developing your course summary no later than the second week of school. If you haven't started then you're behind. You're going to work on your course summary throughout the semester. You're going to rotate courses and bring your course outline up to date as you rotate doing them. What your goal is to have your course summary up to date by Thanksgiving because Thanksgiving is a big study period and you don't want to use that time for doing course summaries. You want to use that time more productively in terms of preparing for exams. So you're going to organize your course summary around issues not cases. You're going to synthesize. You're going to take all the law from all the different areas and synthesize it into clear cut rules, standards and tests. You're going to use your own words because when you want to be able to repeat these on exams and if you don't use your own words you will spend a lot of time trying to memorize something the way someone else says it instead of the way you need to say it. That said you're going to always use legally applicable words in your terminology. You're training to be a lawyer not a layperson and so your own words must include legal jargon. Even if you use another outline whether it's an outline prepared by the student outline prepared by the professor or a commercial outline you want to rewrite it into your own words. Finally as you do your outline you're going to go from the general to the specific and doing the outline. So as you're working on you you need to I'm just going to briefly go through what it is you need to identify then we're going to go back and I'm going to give you some examples. For each course you need to identify the theories, concepts, causes of action, crimes and our defenses that was covered in that course. Not every theory, not every concept, not every cause of action, not every crime, not every defense will be covered in a course and so you don't need to take responsibility for the law school exams. Now that is not to say that you won't be responsible for it on the baby bar and you need to remember that you have to study for the baby bar in a way that is more inclusive than maybe what you study for exams. For each TCCD you need to identify the primary rule for solving that theory, concept, cause of action. For each rule you want to break them up into the necessary elements that are required to prove the rule. For each element you want to identify the standards or tests that will help you solve whether or not an element has been met. So you want the theory, concepts, causes of action, you want the primary rule for solving the cause of action and then you want the secondary rules, standards or tests for each element. Then you need to identify alternative rules, minority rules, exception rules for each primary or secondary rule. So and that's going to be based on what your faculty member covered, not just in class but what they assigned in the reading. This is why you need the table of content. You should presume that you are responsible for understanding and knowing every area that was assigned in reading. So for instance, let's say that your faculty member assigned trespass to shadow in the reading but barely talks about it in class. You're still responsible. You're responsible for knowing all the major information about that cause of action. You want to illustrate rules, elements and standards and tests especially concepts that you're having difficulty with. Use high short hypotheticals to illustrate them. And then finally, you want to identify important policy reasons behind the rules elements, standards and tests because it's the policy reasons that will bump a C plus B plus paper into an A paper. So when you get into it doing your analysis and you use a discussion of how this rule or applying this rule in this way are not applying it, will meet some policy objective, that's a high level paper. So when you're doing your summary, you should constantly be asking yourself because you remember you're going to be doing it every two weeks because you're only taking two courses. You don't need to do a summary for this course, this, our primary focus of this course is teaching you the skills that you need for studying the skills that you need for writing good exams and we are constantly reinforcing that throughout the course and we will be testing you on the application of that in exams. And so if you do the things you need to do for your contracts course and for your tort course, then you will be preparing for this course because you will be better able to write good answers because you know the law very well. So we said this earlier but we'll say it again, you should be starting now when you set a specific time, when you're going to work on your summary and a set of a specific amount of time, couple of hours every two weeks is good. Gather the resources that you need, your case brief, your class notes, focus on issues and not cases, use resources for the rules but put the rules in your own word, use cases for examples and use your own words, go from the general to the specific. So your course outline, your course summary is going to be organized around the theories, concept, causes of actions and when you get into criminal law, crimes and defenses, battery, negligence, consideration, offer, adverse possession, defensive others are all examples of the major theories, concept, causes of actions around which you're going to organize your summary. You're going to have to arrive at a primary rule for each theory, concept, cause of action, crime or defense. You want to have as few words as possible and you want it to be in words that in your own words but you want it to be something that is legally correct. So a battery requires an act of intent resulting in a harmful or offensive contact, consideration, to have an enforceable agreement, there must be consideration on both sides. So you're going to have to arrive at a primary rule for each theory, concept, then you're going to take the rule and break it into elements that is the component parts, that is each part that must be proven and you're going to define the standard or test for each element and any exception to the definition. That's what needs to go into your summary because that's what you need to learn. These are things also you're going to put on your flashcards and we're going to talk about making and using flashcards. Consent may, for instance, consent may be actual implied, okay, so then I have to have a definition for when actual consent and then I have to put in the exceptions to actual consent and I have to have a definition for implied consent, a rule, standard or test. You want to wear appropriate and it's not appropriate in all circumstances but if there exists alternative rules or minority rules or trends then you want to break that, you want to identify those rules and you want to break those rules into the elements with their standard or test. So it's not enough to know just the majority rule, you need to know the minority rule and you need to know the standard and test for the minority rule. This is all knowledge that you have to have in order to do issue spotting and analysis. It is not knowledge that by itself will be sufficient. It's necessary but not sufficient for doing well on law school exams and on the bar. You may want to use illustrations to illustrate the definitions and exceptions especially if you find you don't necessarily want to illustrate everything but if you have a hard time with a certain concept then putting in an illustration will help you when you when you're studying an illustration can say okay this is this is what I meant this is what this means using the illustration. In this I used example an exception to actual consent is fraud and we put in an example we put the rule in for fraud a defense and then we put an example of where there was no consent and where there was consent even though the person had been tricked. So you do want to use illustration, you want to illustrate them definitions and exceptions. You can't illustrate everything and so you want to make choices about what to illustrate, illustrate the things that you're having difficulty with so that as you go back to your summary which you're going to go back every two weeks you're going to go back reread your summary from the beginning you're not just going to pick it up and start where you left off you're going to go back and reread the summary see if anything needs to be changed based on what you've already done and then move it forward. So you keep one of the things about learning something is to keep revisiting it over and over again in a different way and this is one way to do that. You want to identify the policy reason behind rules and elements because I said policy is what sets off the the good exams from the great exams and so understanding policy so that as you argue about how the law should be applied putting in that applying it this way does or does not meet the policy behind the rule makes strengthens your analysis. Policy will not be enough. You can't argue just policy. You have to argue what the law is how the law is applied to the facts and then use policy to strengthen your argument. So here's a tentative schedule you can use for doing your car summaries. Let's assume you start this week September the 23rd and you rotate every other week. You spend a couple of hours each week one and a half to two hours each week reviewing bringing your course summary up to date. By the time you get to November Native American week your course outline should be up to date and what you should be doing during that period is exam prep. You are not having a vacation. Scratch that out of your mind. That week that you're off is not a vacation from school it's more concentrated study time and it would be good for you if you could in fact take a vacation from work so that you can study more it had this time to concentrate study. When I taught full time I used to have Thanksgiving dinner at my house so that first year students could come over to my house have a nice Thanksgiving meal and then go home because if you go home if you're at home and for you for you all you all are going to be at home there's going to be such a hard pressure on you to take the time to do things with your family. Take the time to visit with people who are visiting. Take the time to enjoy your kids. No this is not the time for that. What you need to do is schedule Thanksgiving day as a day that you will take the time for your family Native American day one day during that week and then the rest of the time you need to get up and go into the library and study and then you need to redo for the coming coming out of the November holiday period you want to redo your you want to put in any study periods bringing your exam up to date I it's my impression that that not all schools have a study period right before exams if you're in a school that doesn't have a study period right before exams using this time is even more important so trust the process prepare for success uh uh doing summaries is part of preparing you to think like a lawyer and sound like a lawyer I I and it it's a part of the process that will lead you to uh your personal best lead you to to doing well on the uh law school exams and lead you to passing the baby bar in the bar the first time if you have any questions and comments post them on Moodle