1L - First Year Lesson Topics

This lesson provides time management strategies for law students.

One of the best ways to learn and remember something is to connect it to something that you already know. Once you have made that connection, it becomes easier to use the new information, because you are connecting it to something that you already understand. Making these connections is called transfer. You can transfer vertically (i.e. from one topic in criminal law to another, or from Contracts 1 to Contracts 2), or you can transfer horizontally from course to course (i.e. from contracts to criminal law).

First-year law students often understand the law and know the right conclusion, but struggle to apply the law thoroughly in order to maximize their scores. This lesson is designed to help law students who may have received feedback that their analysis is conclusory.

Final exams require recalling information from over 14 weeks of the semester. This lesson provides insight on how to remember the vast information from class to apply on final exams.

This lesson explores one of the fundamental lawyering skills, which is to be able to spot issues. This lesson looks at what an issue is, and best practices in spotting them in cases, with clients, and on exams. Students will go through basic issue spotting exercises to better prepare for exams.

This lesson explains some key differences between legal writing and exam writing. First, the lesson demonstrates the relationship between legal writing and exam writing. Next, the lesson explains the differences between legal writing and exam writing. After you complete this lesson you will be able to transfer writing and analysis skills learned in your legal writing course to your final exams.

You may have heard that lawyers are precise. It’s true. In law school, you will spend a lot of time discussing the meaning of a singular word or placement of a comma.

It is also true that sometimes there is more than one way to say something, or multiple phrases may mean essentially the same thing. It can be tricky to hear both that every punctuation mark and word matters, and that you must be nimble enough to recognize when two sources are talking about the same concept in different terms. This lesson is designed to show you some examples both of precision, and of when two things essentially mean the same thing.

This lesson provides memorization tools and techniques for exam success. First, the lesson demonstrates the relationship between memorization and exam success. Next, the lesson explains memorization tools and techniques. After you complete this lesson you will be able to apply tools and techniques and effectively memorize important legal concepts to be successful on your exams.

This lesson will teach you the best ways to prepare for exams, and the best ways to organize your response on the day of your exam.

This lesson will discuss ways to identify the legally significant facts within cases using pre-reading strategies.

Law school will consume your life during the three or four years that you are enrolled. But that doesn’t mean that life stops. Bills still have to be paid; people still get sick; the rest of the world keeps rolling on.

There will likely be a time during your legal education when you need help with something. The good news is that there are plenty of people available to help. You are not alone. Whatever you are going through, someone else has gone through too. It’s important to reach out for help, so you can work through your problems, without hurting your academic performance.

This lesson will address what to do if you face a variety of academic and life issues. It will also get you to begin thinking about post-graduation planning.

This lesson teaches you why, when and how to create outlines when preparing for your law school exams.

Throughout law school, students will be asked to assess their own essays by comparing them to a model or sample student answer provided by their professor. It can often be difficult to distinguish one’s work from the model. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish what a student knows, from what they wrote down. Experienced legal writers understand that subtle differentiation in language changes the meaning of what was written. This lesson will provide students with strategies for self-assessment, so that they can become critical judges of their work, and consequently precise legal writers.

This lesson teaches a methodical approach for all law school multiple choice questions. The step-by-step approach provides a framework to work through questions so students can more easily eliminate distractor answer choices. The lesson will thoroughly explore each step in this analytical approach.

This lesson focuses upon the concept of metacognition and teaches you how to enhance your understanding about how you learn to better improve your study, organizational, test-taking and self-assessment skills with the goal of improving your performance in law school.

The lesson should help you better understand your individual learning process and show you how to use this information to develop study and test-taking skills needed for success in law school.

In this lesson, we will provide some steps you can follow to improve your reading comprehension.

This lesson focuses on case briefing. The lesson will guide students through cases identifying the most important part of cases to prepare for classes.

This lesson explores one of the fundamental lawyering skills, which is to think like a lawyer, or analyze. Students will go through basic analysis exercises, so they can master this technique prior to writing exams.

This lesson also includes video commentary from the author that expands on the material in the lesson.

This lesson teaches you how to select the right answer in a multiple-choice question by better understanding how to identify wrong answers, based on nine specific types of wrong answers.

Creating Study Aids is part of the Academic Support series of CALI Lessons. This lesson introduces you to law school study aids. It begins with a brief overview of self-regulated learning and Bloom's learning taxonomy. Then, the lesson introduces law school study aids by pairing them with learning objectives at each level of the taxonomy. Finally, the lesson concludes with an activity designed to help you reflect on your learning. It can be used as an introduction, supplement, or as review.

This lesson will cover the basic structure of written legal analysis: IRAC. IRAC stands for Issue, Rule, Application/Analysis, Conclusion. There are slightly different versions of IRAC which may be used for different legal documents. This lesson will focus on IRAC for essay exam writing. Some faculty may prefer CRAC, or CIRAC, where the conclusion is placed first. You may also learn CRREAC for writing legal memos and briefs, which stands for Conclusion, Rule, Rule Explanation, Application, Conclusion.

This lesson is designed to help students understand notice and service of process. It covers the constitutional standard for notice as articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court and service of process under Rule 4 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (Rule 4).

This lesson teaches about the law of bailments, i.e., the law that controls the rights and duties of a possessor of tangible personal property (goods) who is not the owner.

This lesson addresses the First Amendment protections for student speech in public elementary and secondary schools. You willl learn about the legal standards from United States Supreme Court cases that apply to different types of student speech, and how lower courts have interpreted these standards. You will then apply these standards to factual scenarios in multiple choice and essay type questions. This lesson includes the standards that apply to off-campus and online speech.