Law Schools

First Monday Musings By Dean Vik Amar: 5 Pieces Of Advice For New (And Returning) Law Students

Important tips and tricks from a law school dean that will help you start the new academic year on the right foot.

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As thousands of new (1L) and returning law students make their way to campuses over the next few weeks, I offer below — based on my experience teaching at six different law schools over the past two decades — five pieces of advice about how get the most out of the legal educational experience.

1. Work Hard, and Also Smart: To be sure, law school (like legal practice) involves lots of hard work. A banner I once saw in a charter middle school applies to law schools too: “Don’t pray for a light load; pray for a strong back.”

But the raw number of hours spent studying is not the only, or even the best, measure of good effort in law school. Strategy is important in law school, just as in the real world, and what matters most is how — rather than how much — time is spent.

Law grads serve customers, who may include individuals, businesses, government agencies, judges, in-house counsel, or (quite often) other lawyers, such as partners, within a practice group. Successful attorneys are ones whose customers walk away satisfied.

Although less obvious, law students also have customers — most commonly, the law faculty, for whom students produce work product in the form of exams, papers, etc. Just as different customers in the real world may prefer different things from lawyers, law professors might not all react to the same work product the same way. The ability to quickly figure out what a particular customer is looking for, and to vary your style and approach accordingly, is a characteristic that the real world values, and thus something you should develop from the beginning of law school.

2. Read the Materials Actively: One often hears that law school is not about comprehending or memorizing the content of particular legal rules (which may change over time and thus must be looked up anew in the future anyway), but rather about learning how to analyze ambiguous materials to tease out legal rules, understanding how rules can interact with each other as they are applied, and appreciating the best ways to defend or critique particular rule applications.

This (oversimplified but still useful) statement of the nature of legal education means, among other things, that it is not enough for you to read a case and understand what the judges said. You must also consider why they chose to say what they said, and in the particular way that they said it. A law casebook assignment is more than an exercise in SAT-like reading comprehension; it is an invitation for you to ask questions such as: How does what is said here compare to what is said elsewhere? If what is said here is correct, what follows from this? What questions would one naturally expect other cases down the line to have to address? And so forth.

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This kind of analysis requires a student not just to follow along in the case materials, but to attack them: to break them down, look at their component parts, reassemble them in different ways, and more. Although everyone’s style is different, I found when I was a student that I was not reading energetically and methodically enough if I was not scribbling down a lot of questions and comments to myself (to return to later) in the margins of the casebook as I provisionally evaluated each paragraph and what it added or was trying to add. For me — and perhaps for many others — active reading involves a fair amount of writing.

3. Set Aside Time for Thinking: An excellent law firm partner for whom I worked lamented that while the standard time sheets that many lawyers use for recording how they spend their time — so that clients can receive some detail along with their bills — contained categories for many lawyerly tasks (such as researching, drafting, editing, sending emails, and participating in conferences and telephone conversations), they did not contain a category for what good lawyers do that justifies their high billing rates: simply thinking, carefully and systematically, about what they have read or heard.

Many a law student and junior lawyer assumes that researching the relevant materials is most of the work. To the contrary, when the research is finished, the hardest and most important work — trying to fit all the research into a detailed big picture that makes sense, and that can be framed so as to benefit one side or another in a dispute — is just beginning. Most areas of law contain ambiguity, a fact that many law students resent but ought to embrace; if legal questions yielded mathematically precise answers, most anyone could be a good lawyer. Playing with and shaping ambiguity is how lawyers earn their keep. But to do that, one really has to sit and reflect on how the small pieces fit together, and at which intersections there is the most room for beneficial manipulation. Law students should, early on, get into the habit of setting aside chunks of time after they are done reading on a topic simply to intellectually digest.

4. Make the Time to Write: Translating analysis into a written product is how most lawyers earn their keep; written communication is a lawyer’s stock-in-trade. Learning to write effectively about legal topics takes time and intense engagement. Unfortunately, the other realities of law school make it challenging to devote time to improve writing skills. To be sure, there are (often required) courses in “legal writing,” but getting (or staying) in good writing shape requires regular exercise for the rest of your career, not just for a semester or two. Writing exams (and practice exams for preparation) and seminar papers will help some, but not nearly enough. Get in the habit of frequently writing shorter items — a paragraph at the end of your class notes distilling your thoughts about a case or a professor’s presentation of it; an email to a classmate or a professor explaining why you were confused, and posing a crisp question the answer to which should resolve the confusion; addressing in writing some subset of the “Notes and Questions” in between the principal cases in your caseboooks, etc. The more you practice your writing during law school, the better you’ll be at legal practice after you graduate.

5. Learn The Difference Between What Is and What Ought to Be: Today it seems that people from the Right and Left parts of the ideological spectrum have difficulty understanding the legal mainstream is not always narrow. And relatedly, that oftentimes what is the best answer under existing legal principles may be different than what the most just answer ought to be. But before you can successfully advocate for changing existing law, you must understand what it is how and how it got to be. That may sound frustrating, but successful law students and lawyers accept that reality.

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Good luck on what I hope is a great academic year for you!

Vikram David Amar Vik AmarVikram Amar is the Dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, where he also serves the Iwan Foundation Professor of Law. His primary fields of teaching and study are constitutional law, federal courts, and civil and criminal procedure. A fuller bio and CV can be found at https://www.law.illinois.edu/faculty/profile/VikramAmar, and he can be reached at amar@illinois.edu.

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