general recommendations for law school:

don’t stress;
don’t get involved in talking about grades or the like
(it only makes you unecessarily stress);
stay true to a hobby (e.g., exercise, relaxing,
movies, etc.);
socialize with people outside law school (to maintain
perspective);
go to all your classes and note what the professor is
pointing to with the discussion — class discussion
almost always foreshadows exam questions;
learn how to outline ASAP;
for exam purposes, forget about briefing cases — make
sure your final outline has one rule (and possibly a
policy proposition) for each case;
be able to articulate each section of your courses
(e.g., intentional torts, torts — or 1st Amendment,
con law) in a few sentences;
go to office hours for clarity EVERYTIME you are
unsure about anything;
check out the “Understanding” series by Westlaw Pub.
– they are the best exam prep books;
also check out High Court Summaries — they are the
best case briefs (if on exams you can articulate each
case like HCS, you’ll get all A’s).

most importantly, see Professor Kreiger’s invaluable site:

http://www.law.fsu.edu/academic_programs/humanizing_lawschool/studentresources.php

make sure to thoroughly explore it!!

if you are worried about money, that’s the way it goes. you have to think of everything as an investment. if you
save 12 dollars here and there, you’re really missing
out on tens of thousands in a few years. when you
apply for jobs 3L, you’ll feel like a fool if you
didn’t try your best to do your best. just bite the
bullet and buy the best suppliments (see above). think
of what you spend on beer (or your personal vice) and
then think of your investment in performance enhancing
legal aids ;)

i clerked at the Florida Supreme Court and graduated
with honors … so, in my humble opinion, these
suggestions should be helpful.

i am currently a member of the CA bar. feel free to
email me directly with further questions:

damien.hoffman@gmail.com

regards,

damien

There is much to said, however, about the ridiculous disconnect of what is required to not look like an ass in class throughout the semester (i.e., do every little scrap of reading for every class, and know the intimate details of each case) and to not look like an ass on the exam (apply the general rules & standards one is to have magically gleaned from the cases to the particular wacky fact pattern of the exam question).

Still, I solved it simply by doing the reading as closely as I could, and remembering that being called upon & failing to recall some little detail of the case was not the end of the world. Everybody would do it through the course of the semester.

More important was paying very close attention to the sort of hypos & musings the professors engaged in — there’s a temptation at first to tune these out, thinking, oh come, that scenario is ridiculous or what could possibly be the point of this path of discussion? Paying careful attention to all of these explorations of the fuzzy outer edges of the rules really does, in the end, help bring them into better focus. Professors wouldn’t be wasting their time on things they don’t deem important, and figuring out how or why they might be important winds up making you learn more than you might think.

I always found looking at the study guides vaguely confusing — phrasing slightly differently from in class, or emphasizing this or that point more. And let’s face it — throughout this profession, what’s ‘right’ is what the person behind the bench (or lectern) thinks is right. And while that might sound a little cynical, it was a view I had long before law school (probably born from polisci classes on the Supreme Court), and I think it’s just simply inherent in the nature of fallible human judges.

So, the longwinded moral of my story — pay attention to the judge who’s going to be assessing you a grade, and don’t spend either much time or money on those who aren’t.