4) Professors are human… that is to say they’re lazy.
Professors are, by and large, great. They’re also people who teach the same thing over and over and over again for years while trying to manage their real job of writing books and attending faculty meetings. That means they’re prone to take some shortcuts that you can exploit. And the biggest one involves trying to decode the exam before exam day. There are a few tricks to this.
a) Old exams: A lot of professors will make old exams publicly available. Read those. It’s a gateway into their soul. Figure out what lessons are most important to them, how they structure a question, what wrinkles they introduce year-to-year. Back to the mantra of “working backward” the sooner you can figure out what the professor finds important, the sooner you can master that subject.
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And if there aren’t publicly available exams, or the supply stops after a couple years, then do whatever you can to find the missing exam. Because law professors — wittingly or unwittingly — reuse exams all the time.
b) Other professors’ exams: Personal experience on this one. My Torts professor was tight with the Torts professor teaching the other section. Guess whose prior exam became a model for our exam? It’s not as important as learning the mind of your own professor, but this can be a real resource.
c) Real-life: Law professors are suckers for this one. If some major media event touches on the subject matter, a law professor might easily jazz it up to test all manner of issue-spotting. Say Taylor Swift’s tour bus crashes. You’d better believe it crashed because of a faulty brake line in another vehicle while Taylor’s driver was drunk on the border of two states with different negligence standards while Taylor was on the phone to the tabloids defaming Katy Perry. Be on the lookout and dissect the news from the angle of your course. It might just come up. If it doesn’t, it’s still good practice.
5) Read Above the Law/Tip Above the Law
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A little self-serving? Sure. But it’s true. If you want to work in the legal industry, why not read about it? Find out what the firms are paying, what public interest jobs are mired in the latest budget cuts, when lawyers are unjustly abused, what cutting edge legal fields look like, what technologies are going to change your practice, or breaking legal news about the bar exam. Also divert yourself from time to time to read about what Biglaw firms made epic screw-ups or how pro se clients are embarrassing themselves with prosanity today. Enter one of our contests for fame and glory. Come meet us at an event and get some free food and drinks while networking with like-minded folks.
In any event, keep reading the site. Follow us on Twitter (@atlblog) to see the stories as we write ’em. Or follow us individually (I’m @JosephPatrice, we’ve also got @DavidLat @ElieNYC, @StaciZaretsky, and @Kathryn1 — we’re not above a hashtag war). Like our page on Facebook. Subscribe to the newsletter. Get the mobile app. Listen to the podcast. There’s tons of ways to keep up with us.
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Remember the lessons of this article just might save your life!
Probably not.
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