Introduction to Reading in Law School

1. Introduction to Reading in Law School Ante-Law School Camp session 4: Purposeful Ownership

2. Recap of Week 3: • Reading in the Legal Domain • Experts v. Novices • Reading Strategies • EMpower • Engage w/ Energy • Energy Expenditure of Experts v. Novices • Cultivating Energy • Preflight Assessment • Monitoring

3. Preflight Assessment • Energy Assessment (see p. 66) • If you don’t have enough energy to read well, spend your time on a less demanding study task and come back when you have the right amount of energy • Emotional Assessment • Am I dealing with anything that is likely to interfere with my reading? • Mechanical Assessment • Do I have everything I need to complete my reading?

4. Today: emPOwer • Engage with Energy • Monitor Your Reading and Read for the Main Idea • Always (Always!) Read with a Purpose • Get Oriented and Own Your Prior Knowledge and Experience • There’s More to the “Five Ws” (Who, What, When, Where and Why) Than Meets the Eye • Evaluate What You’re Reading: Your Ideas Matter • Review, Rephrase, Record

5. Read with a Purpose • Designating a purpose before you read increases you efficacy at pulling information from the text, even more so if you select the “right” purpose • Intrinsic v. Extrinsic motivation • Motivation is the activation of goal-orientated behavior.

6. 3 Reasons Successful Students Read • To get an accurate picture of what happened in the case • To gather information about the legal discourse community and the way it reasons through problems • To understand the “big picture” • Active use of inductive reasoning skills (from many specific instances to a general proposition)

7. Extrapolating from the Practice Exercises • Assigned purposes • fact intensive • “identifying how many rose cultivars (specific types, not classes) the author names” • Information intensive • “information to help begin gardening as a hobby” • So, you can read for • Facts • Information (several facts in relationship to each other) • Ideas • Discussions (when trying to understand multiple sources on a topic)

8. Take a Bead on your Text • Inherent cues to get oriented to a text • Casebook cues • Table of contents • Topical headings • Background/summary passages • Case clusters • Points of tension • Review questions • Case cues • Place and date of decision • Disposition of the case • Length of whole and “parts,” e.g., fact recitation & law explanation & analysis

9. Take a Bead on your Text (Cont’d) • External Cues available • Privately Published Study Aids (aka supplements) • Outlines from prior students • Treatises and Hornbooks • Course Syllabus • Peer discussion

10. Owning What You Know • Prior knowledge • Historical or geographic context of a case • Legal issues raised • Understanding of deciding judge’s values • Assumptions about vocabulary words • Ex: “competence” • “Business realities” • Legal reality • Empirically verifiable reality

11. Chapter 8 Exercises • TOC • Preview of gifts of personal property • In re Estate of Evans

12. Resources • Ruth Ann McKinney, Reading Like a Lawyer: Time-Saving Strategies for Reading Law Like an Expert • Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. • “Motivation” wikepedia.org accessed July 1, 2010