Supplements…should I use them?

Everyone starts law school briefing every case and reading every word on every page. Then, it seems that these magical commercial outlines keep popping up and before long students are looking at their laps during class when the have to brief cases. Most people in law school rely on supplements like baseball players rely on steroids. If you think about it, most people in law school don’t finish in the top twenty percent of the class. We could be finding a correlation here.

There are purists out there who do not believe in supplements whatsoever. They believe that you should read the cases, find the trends, and craft your own outlines. I fall somewhere in the middle. I think its very important to read everything you are assigned to read unless you are extremely confident that it is a waste of time. I’m not a big believer in extending myself to do extra reading that a teacher thinks might be of interest. I want the cold hard facts of what’s going to be on a final and how I can absorb that knowledge just long enough to put it out.

Personally, I hate commercial outlines. I don’t even like outlines that are keyed to the specific book that I am using. They don’t help me because I don’t actually learn anything from them. To do well on a law school essay you really have to have a grasp on the big picture. Usually supplements or outlines alone without doing assigned reading will not (in my opinion) give you a grasp on the big picture.

That’s why I use supplements for their exact purpose, which is to supplement the reading that I’m already doing. If I didn’t have the Examples and Explanations books in my first year of law school, I have no idea how my grades would have came out. I would always back up my reading of cases with Examples and Explanations and I feel that they really give me the big picture in addition to the individual cases I was taking in.

I’ve met many people who do not like E & E’s (that’s what we call them on the street) because it doesn’t just throw out the answer for you. It makes you work for it, but it is in layman terms that are very easy to process and understand. Then, it allows you to apply the knowledge with, you guessed it, examples and explanations at the end of every chapter. I’ve included links on the left to many of the first year courses. You can usually find them used on Amazon for much cheaper than your law school bookstore. Final answer: use supplements but make sure you use them the right way and for the right reasons.