Novalawcity

Resource of the Day: The Bluebook Online

Today's resource of note is the interactive online version of the gold-standard citation tool The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.  Not only does the Law Library & Technology Center keep several print copies of the current edition in Reserve readily available for patron use (see Novacat entry for holdings), the LLTC also maintains an organizational subscription to online versions of the 18th (2005) and 19th (2010) editions. 

Easy to navigate and updated to reflect immediate changes, the online Bluebook provides users with great search functionality and allows them to bookmark often-used sections.  To learn more, visit http://www.legalbluebook.com/Public/Tour.aspx.



Access is restricted to Shepard Broad Law Center faculty, students, and staff.  Please contact your friendly neighborhood Law Librarian for the login details.

Law School Exam Tips: A Followup

As a follow-up to my post about exam tips, a quotation from an article about law school education I had intended to use to introduce my previous blog post:

"Studies have shown that the best way to learn is to have frequent exams on small amounts of material and to receive lots of feedback from the teacher. Consequently, law school does none of this."

 -- James D. Gordon III, cited in Lynn C. Herndon, Help You, Help Me: Why Law Students Need Peer Teaching, 78 UMKC L. Rev. 809 (2010).

Law School Exam Tips

Two 1Ls here at NSU asked me the other day for tips for dealing with exams. I felt like I didn’t have a lot of insight. Law school was a long time ago for me, and I didn’t deal with exams too well myself.

So I consulted my awesome colleague Becka Rich, the NSU law library’s new Reference/Faculty Services Librarian. She provided some links and some advice, which I am passing on here.

First, some blog links to blog posts about exams.  Most of the posts (the first post is a collection of links) are very short, so don’t stress over reading them:

CALI’s Law School Exam Advice Post -- CALI gives a list of links to essays and podcasts on how to do well on both essay and multiple choice law school exams.  There’s also a lot of great advice from good sources linked to.

A Common Law School Exam Mistake -- The Volokh Conspiracy blog is helmed by a number of very down-to-earth law professors.  This post talks about how to organize your exam answers and how not to organize them.  If you’re only going to read one link, Becka suggests this one.

Law Career Blog’s Exam-Taking Advice:  Law Career Blog provides a list of their own best advice and a couple of other links. Very short, but helpful.

Lawyerist’s Tried and True Advice for Law School Exams: This is a round-up of their best posts on taking different types of law school exams.

Jurist’s Law School Exams page: The Jurist has a round-up of advice from law professors while noting that the best advice on your exam will come from your professor.

Beyond IRAC: Law School Exam Taking Tips (Law Profession Blog):  Advice from a law professor grading exams on how to write law school exams.  

University of Washington Law Library Law School Exam Page: Includes a bibliography of exam prep sources.

Law Crossing: Grade A Advice on Acing Law School Exams:  A recent grad shares law school exam tips.

Becka also said that candy and toys (which she and Carol Yecies, library associate director, both have) are useful if you need to sit and play for a minute. “But in all seriousness.... Tell them to take a deep breath, if they’ve been paying attention all semester it’s not that bad.  Eating and sleeping and showering are as important, if not more so than studying.  Get some exercise.  I meant it about the sleep.“

So, break a leg on your exams--and don’t stress or obsess!

Your Law School's Ranking? Not as Important as You Think!

Law school success, as measured by grades, is more important for lawyers’ career success and satisfaction than the ranking of the law school they attended, according to a recent study reported by the ABA Journal’s blog.

The study was encouraging news for lower-tier law schools and their students. The ABA article said:

[T]he salary boost for achieving high grades more than makes up for the salary depreciation associated with attending a lower-ranked school. The study also found that lawyers who left law school with the lowest grades felt the least secure about their jobs.

The authors of the study, “The Secret of My Success: How Status, Prestige and School Performance Shape Legal Careers,” summarize how its findings contradict “conventional wisdom”:

The consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school--as measured by law school grades--is the most important predictor of career success. It is decisively more important than law school "eliteness." Socioeconomic factors play a critical role in shaping the pool from which law students are drawn, but little or no discernible role in shaping post-graduate careers. Since the dominant conventional wisdom says that law school prestige is all-important, and since students who "trade-up" in school prestige generally take a hit to their school performance, we think prospective students are getting the wrong message. (p. 2)

Those of you who chose law schools to be closer to home, or because you wanted more practical preparation for practice (a demonstrated strength of NSU's), feel good about your choice! You're likely to be more satisfied with your law school, and over a lifetime, you may well do better.

The yet-to-be-published study is by Richard Sander (UCLA Law) and Jane Yakowitz (Brooklyn Law). It looked at beliefs about the effects of the ranking of the students’ law school, grades in law school, and societal position. It then reviewed the literature and statistics on the effects of these three variables on lawyer career success. It also compared the effects of the factors using a regression model.

Student Information Literacy: Reality and and Possibilities

Are today’s college students prepared to be “digital citizens”? Do they have the tools they need to find, evaluate, and use information in today’s wired world? A Northwestern University suggests not, and a white paper offers some minimum standards for information literacy.

A recent study shows that while college students may be able to find information online, they are not very good at figuring out what information is reliable and authoritative. The study was released by the Communications Studies department at Northwestern University (the press release at http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2010/07/Google.html; the article that reports the study is at http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/636/423). The students in the study relied on commercial search engines like Google, and could not distinguish useful, unbiased websites from biased ones. For example,  the students confuse search rankings with authoritativeness (higher rankings meaning better websites), and they assume that an “.org” web address gives a web site authority (when any organization, even a well-known neo-Nazi group, can get an “.org”  address).

A recent white paper addressed this gap in information literacy. While it does not present solutions to the problem of digital literacy, it does propose some minimum standards that librarians and other educators can rely on. Titled “Basic 21st Century Technology, Information & Communication Skills for Successful Citizens,” (http://www.tblc.org/DigitalSkillsChecklist.pdf), it was written by Paul Alford, the Learning Services Manager for the Citrus County (Florida) library system. The ambitious list suggests skills in three areas, Digital Skills, Information Resource Skills, and Communication & Cognitive Skills, that are necessary for people to be fully prepared to address their own information needs. The list builds on basic skills to support more complex ones. It outlines the sills necessary to make important decisions, learn for themselves, and be engaged with society and government--very important for the law student and lawyer.

A Uniform Bar Exam For Missouri

Via Betsy McKenzie at Out of the Jungle: A recent report in stltoday.com indicates that Missouri has become the first state to adopt a plan to create a single bar exam for lawyers who want to practice anywhere in the United States. Lex Universal also has a write-up of the story. Missouri plans to have the exam ready for those sitting for the bar in February 2011.

Both the American Bar Association and the National Conference of Bar Examiners have signed off on the idea. The test might be universal, but passing the new exam will not mean automatic admission to every state bar in the U.S. First, states have to affirmatively sign on to participate. Then, each participating state will be able to set its own passing grade, as well as other state-specific bar admission policies. According to the stltoday article, several states are considering adopting the uniform bar exam. Lex Universal, citing USAToday, names Arizona, Colorado, North Dakota, and Washington, D.C. as potential adopters.

A Life Transformed--By A (Prison) Law Library

Adam Liptak has an excellent piece in the New York Times about Shon Hopwood, who transformed himself in Federal prison from a bad bank robber to an excellent jailhouse lawyer. Hopwood, who is now working as a paralegal, got his job with a reference from former Solicitor General Seth Waxman.

Hopwood's next stop may be law school. A University of Michigan law professor has already talked to their admissions office about saving him a spot.

Requesting extra time on the LSAT

A prospective law student asked for double the standard time allotment for the LSAT based on an ADHD claim, and is now litigating the issue in Texas. Article

ProfHacker: Tips and Tutorials for Higher Ed

ProfHacker.com is a new online resource, edited by Jason B. Jones of Central Connecticut State University, and George H. Williams of the University of South Carolina Upstate. As their masthead explains, "Monday through Friday, ProfHacker delivers tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education". The tutorials, called ProfHacker 101, offer introductions to online tools such as Google Docs and Bee Docs Timeline, as well as instructions to help you create a blog or a wiki. The site's RSS feed allows you to keep up with the latest posts. Thanks to Maura Smale of ACRLog for the heads-up!

Thinking, And Acting, Like a Lawyer

Readers of Novalawcity may recall a previous post about Paul Lippe's critique of legal education in the United States.  Along those lines, a symposium called "It's More than Grades:  Matching Law School Preparation with Employers' Needs" was conducted at the Florida Bar's Annual Convention.  Former Supreme Court Justice Rauoul Cantero mentioned Lippe's article, pointing out the difference between the hands-on approach of medical school and the more scholarly approach of law school.  Many of the speakers advocated an increased law school emphasis on practical skills.  Gerald Curington, of the governor's office, recalled a cartoon of a lawyer being wheeled into surgery hoping that medical schools taught their students more than how to think like surgeons.

Despite the near-unanimity among symposium speakers that law students need more practical experience, a recent change in the certified legal intern (CLI) program  appears to have caused a dramatic drop in the number of students entering the CLI program. Students wishing to enter the CLI program are now required to undergo full review by the Florida Board of Bar Examiners. Read about the symposium in The Florida Bar News.