A new year is starting for a new crop of 1Ls, and the internet is bursting with advice for them. I admit I consumed this stuff voraciously, stuffing my cheeks with tips, tricks, and how-tos. But I really had no idea what any of it meant in context, and in place of all the earnest advice, what would have really helped me was a brief bird's-eye view of how law school works. So here it is.
As treated in law school, the legal process is a function that maps fact patterns to verdicts. The way that law works is that stuff happens, making a kind of a short story. The court hears this story (through the lawyers) and then returns a decision. You win, you lose. If you imagine stories as little notes spread across a tabletop, the "law" is a line drawn on that surface separating stories with one outcome (the contract is valid, the defendant is guilty, whatever) from the others. The whole project of law school is figuring out where that line is.
What complicates things is that written laws generally just say "the line should be hereabouts," because it's impossible to think up and account for every possible story ahead of time. And on top of that people have all sorts of reasons for saying the line is somewhere when it isn't really. So then only way to know where it actually lies is to check individual points. So instead of traditional textbooks that just tell you the Rules of Physics, law schools use casebooks. A casebook is just a big book of cases, each one an important data point in figuring out where the line is. Law schools could just tell you where the lines are, because that's what professors spend all day thinking and writing about, but the idea is that out in the real world you won't have professors to tell you the answers, and you'll have to figure out where the line is by yourself, by examining cases. So they figure you should learn to do that now. Don't worry, it only takes a few weeks.
Every case in the casebook is a data point to help you figure out where the line is. Importantly, every case has been put in there on purpose to illustrate some part of how the line curves. The trick to law school is extracting the one important thing that a case stands for from all the excess information.
For example, you are almost certain to read a case (in Contracts) about a botched skin graft that causes the patient to grow hair on the palm of his hand. Professors love the wild details, and they may help you remember, but they're irrelevant. The Hairy Hand case (I don't even remember the real name today) stands for the proposition: "If you break a contract, you owe the other side the money equal to the difference between the value of what you promised them and the value of what you gave them." This is the usual way to assess damages in contracts suits, as opposed to other potential measures like "You have to give them the full value of what was promised, ignoring the value of what you already gave them" or "You don't have to give them anything! Ha ha!" The case is full of wild turns about shady plastic surgeons and how you put a dollar value on having a hairy hand or a healthy one, but you don't really need to know all that. All you need to know is how to do the math.
When it's exam time, you apply that line-finding skill. Your average law school exam is what they call an issue-spotter. All that means is the professor writes a handful of short stories, and then asks you what arguments a court might have to decide, and which side of the line they're on. The best way to figure out exactly how to do well is to get old exams, take them under test conditions, and compare your results to the model answers. But that's no different from any other test.
Now a lot of the time the line is blurry, or there's not enough information to draw it precisely, because this shit is hard. We're mapping to legal outcomes from every possible range of human interaction. That's a lot of space to cover. But if you know the two closest points, even if they fall on opposite sides of the line, you'll do alright. Because it is hard and the people implementing it are only human, there's a lot of individual discretion at the margin.
That's the big picture. Everything else you can figure out plenty fast.
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