Ask The Professor: Class of 2017, Welcome to Law School
How can you succeed as a first-year law student? Professor Joseph Marino offers some advice.
Ed. note: Please welcome our newest columnist, Professor Joseph Marino of Marino Legal Academy, who will be writing a bimonthly column about law school and legal education.
Your first year classroom experience is not all that different from the classroom scenes in the well known 1973 movie, The Paper Chase.
“Look to the left, look to your right. Because one of you won’t be here by the end of the year.” It sounds like an urban legend, but it’s not that far off from reality. According to the ABA, roughly 5,000 1Ls across the country will not come back for their second year of law school.
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By now you should be familiar with case briefing and the Socratic method, the decades-long dominant pedagogical approaches for teaching first-year students. It is dramatically different from the days of rolling out of bed after a night out partying and acing the exam that you were used to in college. Unlike college and high school classes where your professor taught you the subject area, in law school you have to take responsibility for your own education….
Case briefing and Socrates’s approach teach critical thinking and legal reasoning while incorporating substantive concepts, but these methods do not teach you all you need to know to get an “A.” Class gives you skills and a foundation to learn from, but the rest is on you.
Having spent 18 years teaching in law school, I have witnessed firsthand why so many 1L students are unable to adapt to the new demands of law school. The problem most first-year students have is a lack of context to what is happening in the classroom. Many students struggle in class or only grasp the narrow discussion associated with the case.
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A law school class is like a jigsaw puzzle. If you take the pieces out of the box as taught, you will need many pieces before you see the big picture. But if you create context by building the border first, you know where the next piece fits in.
My best advice for you is to go into class with enough context so that you can appreciate what the professor is teaching by knowing where it fits into the puzzle, rather than waiting to figure it out after class from a hornbook, commercial outline, or passed-down class outline.
For instance, in law school case books you may find one or two cases on battery. Many casebooks use Mohr v. Williams, 104 N.W. 12 (Minn. 1905). Mohr illustrates that an offensive contact could, in fact, be helpful and not harmful. But that is not all of battery — only one small piece. Without understanding the elements of battery, it would be hard to see where that piece fits in. However, if you had context before going over Mohr in class, then you would see where the case and discussion merge into the overall concept of battery. So don’t wait until after class is over to try and catch up.
Get ahead of your peers by taking a look at your syllabus to see what will be covered and create that context before class by reading about what the professor will cover in class to better appreciate what is being taught.
Wishing you good luck with your studies.
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Professor Joseph Marino has been a fixture in the world of legal education for the past 40 years. Whether you’re just starting law school, about to take the bar, or an attorney in need of CLE, he and Marino Legal Academy are here to help. He is the Director of Marino Bar Review and the Marino Institute for Continuing Legal Education. He writes a bimonthly column, Ask the Professor. Visit the Marino CLE page on ATL, connect with him on LinkedIn and Facebook, or email him via info@marinolegal.com.
