Virtual Bookshelf: September 2022- Back to School

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Volume 1: Advice for pre-law and first-year law students
Volume 2: Advice for second-year law students

Reading cases and statutes is challenging for students and attorneys. However, everybody can learn critical reading strategies and become effective legal readers and advocates. Critical Reading for Success in Law School and Beyond identifies the reading strategies used by expert legal readers and presents the strategies in a systematic sequence. Critical Reading is written in an easy to read style with lots of examples. Readers will learn: the purpose for reading cases, how to read with focus, case structure and important civil and criminal procedure terms, techniques for understanding complex text, strategies for identifying the parts of a case, how to brief a case, legal analysis skills such as analogical reasoning and case synthesis, and strategies for reading statutes.

Written for first year law students text explains how to read and brief cases, take notes, study, maintain balance and succeed.

The Guide to Belonging in Law School is the only book of its kind and should be required summer reading before law school. It accomplishes two discrete goals. First, it requires readers to engage in an authentic, rigorous, mini-law school semester involving reading, studying, five Socratic classes (through the connected website), exam preparation, and exam writing. Second, the book provides a foundation for students from marginalized groups to recognize and manage both subtle and explicit barriers that can impede their progress. Law schools should recommend this book to every incoming law student, especially those from groups underrepresented in the profession.

This study aid explains that success in law school does not require any special skill or genius. It demonstrates that if students can apply the basic techniques described in this book, they can be in the top 10% of their class. This comprehensive guide provides reliable frameworks (backed by cognitive neuroscience) to navigate everything from the first day of law school to the first year of practicing law.

Each year, over 40,000 new students enter America's law schools. Each new crop experiences startlingly high rates of depression, anxiety, fatigue, and dissatisfaction. Kathryne M. Young was one of those disgruntled law students. After finishing law school (and a PhD), she set out to learn more about the law school experience and how to improve it for future students. Young conducted one of the most ambitious studies of law students ever undertaken, charting the experiences of over 1000 law students from over 100 different law schools, along with hundreds of alumni, dropouts, law professors, and more. How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School is smart, compelling, and highly readable. Combining her own observations and experiences with the results of her study and the latest sociological research on law schools, Young offers a very different take from previous books about law school survival. Instead of assuming her readers should all aspire to law-review-and-big-firm notions of success, Young teaches students how to approach law school on their own terms: how to tune out the drumbeat of oppressive expectations and conventional wisdom to create a new breed of law school experience altogether.

Offers one hundred rules that every first year law student should live by "Dear Law Student: Here's the truth. You belong here." Law professor Andrew Ferguson and former student Jonathan Yusef Newton open with this statement of reassurance in The Law of Law School. As all former law students and current lawyers can attest, law school is disorienting, overwhelming, and difficult. Unlike other educational institutions, law school is not set up simply to teach a subject. Instead, the first year of law school is set up to teach a skill set and way of thinking, which you then apply to do the work of lawyering. What most first-year students don't realize is that law school has a code, an unwritten rulebook of decisions and traditions that must be understood in order to succeed. The Law of Law School endeavors to distill this common wisdom into one hundred easily digestible rules.

Law School Exams: A Guide to Better Grades is the complete handbook for students who want to significantly improve their performance in law school.

This book focuses on the reading, studying and testing strategies that are particularly helpful to law students who learn differently. It is a learning guide based upon empirical research and statistical correlations between learning strategies and law school GPA's. This book will also show you what the most successful law students do by using interviews and examples from actual law students.

"Nine Steps to Law School Success is the first scientifically proven study process for success in law school. Synthesized from the study processes of other successful law students, this book provides a straightforward, linear, and chronological study process for students to follow from the beginning of the semester up to their final examination. Students will learn how to complete each step, how each step leads to a deep understanding of course material, and how each step ultimately leads to success in their courses. Students will also learn how to incorporate Nine Steps into their weekly schedules during the semester.

Open Book showcases a distinctive central pedagogy, 'the pinball method of exam-taking, ' and provides detailed examples and a wealth of concrete exam-taking techniques. Initial reviewers--including professors teaching core 1L classes, writing instructors and law school administrators--have been unanimous and enthusiastic in their praise. Numerous student reviewers have likewise remarked that it changed their study habits and their entire outlook on law school. With straightforward prose, memorable, and often humorous illustrations, and a unique insider's perspective, Open Book: Succeeding on Exams from the First Day of Law School opens a clear path to law school success

With the aim of decreasing students' anxiety and increasing their chances of achieving academic success, this book prepares students to succeed in their first year of law school.