Top 10 Law Student Books of the Moment: Starter Edition

We’re unveiling something new here at Law Vibe that has the promisings to be a regular feature: the hottest law school related books that you, the LawVibe community, have been buying over the last three months!

The LawVibe team is able to get a sneak peak into what our readers like in terms of law school books via Amazon. Now, we don’t know what any specific person buys so don’t worry about that. We just know in general what the collective LawVibe readership base likes to buy and finds interesting. It gives us a good vibe on what’s hot in law school books right now.

We’re going to arrange this list starting with the most bought item on the list over the past 3 months. The first line after the link is my personal comment on the book. The second line, in italics, is a clipping from the Amazon review.

1. Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History
   Yes, the book most ordered by law students is the one most unrelated to law school! Read the LawVibe book sample to get a taste of what to expect.
   “Sit back and enjoy a collection of verbatim exchanges from the halls of justice, where defendants and plaintiffs, lawyers and witnesses, juries and judges, collide to produce memorably insane comedy.”
2. Getting To Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams
   The classic book on perfecting your law school exams – preparing and excelling.
   “A study aid that takes legal theory seriously…Students who master these lessons will surely write better exams. More importantly, they will also learn to be better lawyers”
3. Ivy Briefs: True Tales of a Neurotic Law Student
   Excellent first-hand recounting of a very nervous law student, Martha Kimes, in Columbia Law School – check out the LawVibe book review.
   “The self-deprecating wit, catty observations and healthy sense of the absurd with which Kimes describes her approach-avoidance reactions to the world of law school raise the book above the ordinary.”
4. Law School Confidential (Revised Edition): A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience: By Students, for Students
   Walks you from the decision to go into law school all the way to the bar exam.
   “Miller covers every aspect of the law school experience-from surviving the first semester to seeking summer internships-which makes this book unique.”
5. One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School
   The infamous story of Scott Turow’s first year as a Harvard law student.
   “Even though we know he goes on to fabulous success as both a lawyer and a writer, Turow’s initial ego is beautifully subdued by the end of his year as a One L.”
6. Acing Your First Year of Law School: The Ten Steps to Success You Won’t Learn in Class
   Solid book with easy-to-read tips on better outlining, legal research, writing, and more.
   “This book will teach you how to stand head and shoulders above your colleagues in law school, and succeed in your most critical year of law school, the first year.”
7. The Elements of Legal Style
   An intelligent approach to legal writing style – while still keeping itself firmly grounded.
   “A decade after the key first edition, Garner, editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary and other works on legal writing, provides expanded coverage of appropriate legal prose and common errors in legal language, with the goal of encouraging clarity in legal writing.”
8. The Law School Breakthrough: Graduate In The Top 10% Of Your Class, Even If You’re Not A First-Rate Student
   Breaks down the mysteries of law school, including outlining, creating a study schedule, and taking exams in your law classes.
   “The Law School Breakthrough provides a comprehensive, holistic approach to surviving law school-both inside and outside the classroom.”
9. The Complete Law School Companion: How to Excel at America’s Most Demanding Post-Graduate Curriculum
   Gives you specific systems to excel in law school – making law school life easier through organization.
   “Offers complete, accessible information on every topic of concern to law students ranging from the LSAT, the Bar Exam, Law Review, computerized research and videotape study aids to obtaining that important clerkship or job.”
10. How to Succeed in Law School
    More of a jack-of-all-trades book, it gives you a little bit of everything in law school without going too deep into any one subject – a good overview of life in legal education.
    “The author offers advice on taking good lecture notes, effective study methods, library research, test-taking, handling the inevitable stresses of law school, and much more.”

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How to Read Efficiently and Effectively

Time to write on a topic that’s dear to my heart: craziness when it comes to knowing what to read and how to read. Maybe you’re looking to read about the latest advances in law, like second life law firms. Perhaps you’re interested in finding out about the most recent law school rankings.

Internet Information Overload

If you have an active internet lifestyle, then you know that there is a wealth of information at the click of your mouse. There are just literally thousands and thousands of information and articles on any given topic and it’s sometimes it can be very hard to choose which one to read and which ones are worth your attention. Like me, you may also be guilty of jumping from one article to another, skimming the page a few seconds and moving on to another one that also catches your attention. I usually open multi-tabs in my browser in the hope of saving and making the most of my internet time.

The problem for me at least is that I don’t seem to get the maximum information I feel is possible when I use this method. I end up feeling tired of going from one page to another and my eyes begin to strain, and I haven’t finished even one article. It’s a HUGE time-waster I must admit, and hinders my overall productivity. For a long time I never really put much thought about this inconvenience, until the stack of books and articles accumulated that I’ve never gotten around to read reached astronomical levels!

A Method to the Information Overload Madness

It’s not really the information overload that makes our online reading ineffective, but it’s the way or the method in which we do our online reading. Our inability to focus in choosing articles or information that is worth reading makes us a victim of our own curiosity and thereby we waste a lot of our time in the process. Curiosity of course should always be present; it stimulates our learning and broadens our horizons, but what we should do is learn to choose the right information in order to maximize our learning.

So it’s time for a new to focus in on our reading. How? It’s fairly simply really. The first part is put together a list of what you actually want to read. At this stage you don’t have to be selective, and whatever caught your interest is good enough to be bookmarked, however you should fight your tendency to start reading in this stage. It’s best to schedule a specific time for you to do this – so you can perform online searches, skim your RSS feeds, follow interesting links and so on. When you’re done bookmarking, you can save them into different folders in your bookmarks, making it easier for you to get back to them.

Next you’re going to want to decide what you will read. You must schedule a time to do the actual reading of the things you’ve accumulated. When you schedule, decide what you will read on that particular time. This way, your reading will be more focused and your productivity level will greatly improve. Instead of reading five or more articles on the same topic on different days, you can read them in one session providing you more ideas and inspiration. Focused attention brings clarity.

Lastly, you’re going to want to trash whatever you feel won’t be useful for you to read. This is plain and simple and is self explanatory. Schedule a time when you’ll check your folders for any items that you feel are no longer useful and delete them. When in doubt, throw it out. If it’s really important, there’s an almost 100% chance someone else will have a copy or will bring it to your attention.

How to Use Game Theory to Improve Your Law School Grades

From The Distillery:

Law school is a competitive place: our grades are essentially rankings; 15% of the class gets A’s, 60% gets B’s, 20% gets C’s, and the last 5% get D’s.

This is not just ‘how it is’; classes do not invariably possess such a distribution of student-talent, rather these grade distributions are imposed by a ranking system which essentially DICTATES that this must be our grade distribution.

So, since these grades are essentially rankings, if you have the misfortune of being in a particularly smart class of people, you, unfortunately, cannot all do well. Rather, the grade distribution will be the same, and some people who might be A and B students in another class will get C’s in this class of particularly adept students.

It doesn’t take a game theorist to figure out that at law school, willingness helping other people and sharing notes causes an awkward and uneasy predicament. After all, why help others if it to your detriment?

On account of this, people are understandably reluctant to share their notes, often concocting implausible stories for not wanting to do so “Oh my dog ate my notes from that class”; “Oh, I don’t have my notes from that class in this big document that says ‘composite notes from every class’”. Yeah; whatever…

Well, let’s ignore for a second the moral obligation which would suggest that you should share notes, and let’s think about the mathematics. Mathematically speaking, when is it OK to share your notes, and when is it to your detriment?

For the purposes of this exercise, let’s assume that people are inherently inclined to comply with a request to share notes or offer help, unless it is to their detriment.

I’m going to start with my conclusion and work from there: You should offer to help anyone who you know (or are reasonably certain) will do better than you, and anyone who you know (or are reasonably certain) will do worse than you.

OK, so why?

Lets say you are at the bottom of the class; you always get D’s. If someone who would otherwise get a C asks you for help, and on account of this help, they manage to get a B (or even an A), how has this hurt you? It hasn’t. It has influenced the grade distribution, but in a range that it is not applicable to you. It doesn’t matter if that person is ranked one above you, or if they are number one in the entire class. It makes no difference to you so long as they will be above you either way. Above is above, below is below.

Similarly, if you are a top student; you always get A+’s, you should help anyone who asks. Whether your help brings a D student to a C, a C student to a B, or even a B student to an A, you are at the top of the class, and the grade distribution below you is irrelevant to you.

So, now, morals aside, when should you REFUSE to help someone? You should only refuse to help someone who you feel has a reasonable chance of doing WORSE than you in the absence of your help, but may do BETTER than you on WITH your help. It is these people you have to watch out for, because they are the ones who you can actually help to your own detriment; these are the people who, by helping, can lower your ranked mark from a B to a C; from a C to a D.

Of course, in the real world, you can never be entirely certain how well you will do, or how well others will do in your class, so the ‘safest bet’ is not to help anyone, but if you KNOW of a large grade discrepancy between you and someone asking for your help, you can pretty safely help them and know that it will not be to your detriment.

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