The Law School Playbook

Welcome to The Law School Playbook! I’m Halle Hara, a professor of academic success and personal skills coach to law students and attorneys. I’m glad you’re here! Congratulations on the steps you have taken toward earning your law degree. If you are a 1L just starting out, these letters on law school learning and training will guide you to get the most of out of your experience.

At the risk of sounding like a nagging parent, I implore you to please read for class—it is not optional. I know if you had your druthers, you’d mark every assignment on your syllabi with “TL; DR,” for “too long, didn’t read,” especially in the busiest year of your academic life. However, you are overlooking the critical fact that reading is what lawyers get paid to do.

I’m a few years older than you. When I wanted information growing up, I turned to an outdated set of encyclopedias my parents bought from a door-to-door salesman or I went to the library. Reading is different today. Inquiring minds no longer grab the musty, dust-covered encyclopedias from the shelf but instead are immersed in digital media approximately seven hours per day. This progress is truly amazing—nearly every question you can conceive of can be answered in a few clicks. However, reading in this digital age has taken a toll on our intellect.

My goal is not only to change if you read but also how you read for law school. For instance, you may be reading for class because you don’t want to be embarrassed if you are called on or want to cross the assignment off your always-growing “to do” list. When reading experts instruct you to read with a clear purpose, however, that’s not what they have in mind.

We’ve all had those moments when we are sitting in front of a book, with our head resting on our hand, when our eyes begin to close. You tell yourself that you are “just resting your eyes,” which is something my Dad would say to me if I tried to change the channel when he was asleep on the couch. As much as you try to fight it, your body keeps drifting back to sleep. What do you do?

If you find yourself just getting through your reading assignments, you’re not alone. The good news is that there are easy strategies that take no additional time but will ensure you’ll get a lot more out of your reading. One of those strategies involves finding your inner actor.

I was lucky enough to work in the federal trial court for a collective fifteen years. During that time, and in private practice, I saw countless jury trials. Whether civil or criminal, the trials always had one thing in common: the judge instructed the jury to exercise their common sense in deliberations. For example, the jury instruction about weighing the evidence would sound something like this: “Don’t leave your common sense at the courthouse door. It is up to you to decide what evidence is reliable. You should use your common sense in deciding which evidence is the best evidence and which evidence should not be relied upon in reaching your verdict.”

Law students, particularly in their first year, look for truth in the cases that they read. Even second-year law students likely figure that the judge knows much more about a given topic than they do, so they read cases to see what they can learn.

Some people say that talking to yourself means you’re crazy. Other people say that talking to themselves is the only way they can have an intelligent conversation. In this coaching session, I will explain how, jokes aside, talking to yourself as you read really does give rise to an intelligent conversation.

There is no question that time is the elephant in the room throughout the entire law school experience—there just isn’t enough of it. All law students struggle with time management, even those that are high achieving and well organized. The phrase “time matters” is not just relevant in law school. Indeed, LexisNexis aptly named its law practice management software “Time Matters,” which is a reminder that there typically isn’t much of it after you graduate either.

Who says law school doesn’t foster creativity? To the contrary, an effective reading strategy involves visualizing or using imagery to picture what is being described in your law school text.

We have discussed numerous strategies that can prompt you to be an engaged, critical thinker while reading. It is important for you to recognize, however, that your willingness to continually monitor your own thoughts and assess your own understanding as you read is essential to you becoming an expert reader. You must choose to engage in a disciplined analysis of the text, making connections between ideas and considering numerous perspectives. Stated simply, it is up to you to engage in the metacognition—thinking about your thinking—as you work through cases. Being able to recognize the reading strategies available to you may help with that process.

My parents were avid golfers when I was a teen. Every so often I’d join them on the golf course, although I was pretty unskilled. I’d step up to the tee and the well-intentioned coaching from my parents inevitably followed: keep your head down, your arms straight, nice and easy, focus on the follow through, and so on. I remember being frustrated and thinking, “Should I juggle and spin plates on my head at the same time too?”

The law school experience is so focused on reading and interpreting appellate cases that students sometimes overlook the central role that legislation plays in practice. The reading and interpretation strategies in this series of episodes pertains to many kinds of enacted law (or requirements with the force of enacted law), such as statutes, regulations, ordinances, and municipal law. For ease of reference, however, I will refer to the coaching strategies in this series as reading and interpreting statutes.

Celebrity chef Guy Fieri has said:There are two different things: there’s grilling, and there’s barbecue. Grilling is when people say, ‘We’re going to turn up the heat, make it really hot and sear a steak, sear a burger, cook a chicken.’ Barbecue is going low and slow.

So today, our work of reading and interpreting statutes continues. After the first step—slowing down—the next step is to determine how the statute fits into the big picture. As you learned with case reading, background knowledge, even if acquired just prior to reading the text, makes you a better, more efficient reader. To put the statute in context, take the time to look at the table of contents. Look at the surrounding sections to see how the statute fits into the big picture.

We are continuing our discussion of reading and interpreting statutes. To recap the steps we have covered thus far, when approaching a statute, you must: …

Today, we are picking up our ongoing discussion of reading and interpreting statutes. We will discuss the final step in this episode, which is to resolve ambiguities or to add clarity to vague language.

In this episode, we will be focusing on steps 1 and 2 of reading and interpreting statutes, which we know are to: slow down (step 1) and determine how the statute fits into the big picture by looking at surrounding statutory materials (step 2).

We are going to pick up where we left off in the last episode, where a commercial airline pilot named Sean Fitzgerald showed up for work “rip-roaring drunk” and engaged in pre-flight work before he was arrested. The statute he is alleged to have violated is 18 U.S.C. § 343, and we are now at step 3, which requires us to look at the language of the statute itself and methodically break it down.