Legal Studies Skills: Student Study Groups

Question

Based on your decades of experience as a law school professor and Bar Exam and Law School tutor, what is your assessment of study groups?

Answer 1

CONSIDER SAYING "NO" TO STUDY GROUPS

(1) Who says your fellows know more than you know?

(2) Simply because one or more of your colleagues graduated towards the top of their law school class does not mean they have the ability to teach what they know.

(3) In law school, different professors use different terminology in explaining the law. Often, then, your friends will use different legal jargon than the terminology that will be on the Bar Exam key or that you were taught. A professor at a state law school might say that a sale of goods contract is formed when an offeror communicates a desire or intent to buy a particular product from an offeree which is accepted without any variation in terms, while an old school Ivy League professor might demand that his/her students recite that "the offer manifest an intent to be bound" "vesting a power of acceptance in the offeree". One teaches in alignment with Garner's "Legal Writing in Plain English". The other teaches using the jargon Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. used in "The Common Law- Compilation of Lectures" (1881).

(4) Study groups are simply one more example in a long list of examples of Bar Exam prep "over sourcing", a fate often worse than under sourcing.

(5) At a bare minimum put each other through this simple vetting process (for which you can thank Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics at Caltech and a part of the Manhattan Project): "If you can't explain what you think you know to an eighth grader (even something as complex as particle physics) you don't know it." (paraphrased).