0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall. Forum

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rexmanning

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by rexmanning » Wed Jun 26, 2013 1:26 am

gatorfan163287 wrote:Preparing with a lot of nugs, chillin, and grindage. If you don't get the reference look it up and watch the movie.

But seriously I'm reading GTM, Law School Confidential, and studying for the GMAT and taking it right before moving (I obviously hate myself).
YES. Bop the wood. You're the man.

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NoodleyOne

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by NoodleyOne » Wed Jun 26, 2013 1:54 am

Bfalcon wrote:
NoodleyOne wrote:All my stuff is moved into my new place... back in my previous city, cleaning out the apartment and doing some last minute chores...

Will be living in Charlottesville for good come Wednesday.
Dude! Good luck on the move eh! You deserved this...and I sincerely hope you won't actually be living in Cville for good. 3 years maybe, but not for good :wink:
Yeah... perhaps poorly worded. Looking forward to three years there, though.

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NoodleyOne

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by NoodleyOne » Tue Jul 16, 2013 12:55 pm

Bumping this... since I've had a ton of free time I'm actually doing some... 0L prep for lack of better term. I am working on my typing speed (which is around 90wpm now... trying to top 100 consistently) and learning how to effectively and efficiently use OneNote. I think I'm also going to read Getting to Maybe. Also, I swim a lot.

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sinfiery

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by sinfiery » Tue Jul 16, 2013 4:47 pm

I glanced at some CLS law exams/model answers on google. Doesn't seem too bad. Don't think ill do much anything else.

nickb285

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by nickb285 » Tue Jul 16, 2013 4:49 pm

.
Last edited by nickb285 on Sun Jul 16, 2017 3:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Uncle Lou

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by Uncle Lou » Tue Jul 16, 2013 5:02 pm

nickb285 wrote:My 0L preparation now consists of trying to find a place to live in DC and moving across the country in the next 4-5 weeks. Still going to Belize though, fuck canceling that.
Yeah, fuck canceling trips.

Oh wait. :?

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magp90

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by magp90 » Wed Jul 17, 2013 5:28 pm

Training my replacement at work as I type. Next Friday couldn't come soon enough

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jselson

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by jselson » Thu Jul 18, 2013 2:53 pm

Read GtM, reading Ward Farnsworth's "The Legal Analyst," combing through Krugman's Econ textbook, playing video games. Gonna need a personal loan for move-in costs. Trying not to think about next summer's expenses if I get a judicial internship. Need a haircut and more professional clothes.

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Jaqen

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by Jaqen » Sun Jul 21, 2013 3:20 am

GtM and playing around with OneNote.

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togepi

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by togepi » Sun Jul 21, 2013 3:02 pm

I've finished reading 3/4th of GTM and both Delaney books. Apparently I have commitment issues.

I need to look into OneNote. I have Lenovo and it came with Evernote. Is that pretty much the same thing or should I fork out some dough for Office.

Oh... AND WANT
http://www.goofts.com/game-of-thrones-toilet-decal.html

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kay2016

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by kay2016 » Tue Jul 23, 2013 1:51 am

Moving Friday...

I have next to nothing packed (feels like it..)

Yikes.

Luckily tonight was my last night of work but... I'm very frantic.

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06102016

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by 06102016 » Thu Jul 25, 2013 1:46 am

..

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sublime

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by sublime » Thu Jul 25, 2013 2:26 am

..

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Mr. Frodo

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by Mr. Frodo » Thu Jul 25, 2013 3:28 am

Spending half my summer in Europe, the other half hanging with my friends from undergrad I probably won't see for a while, drinking, going to new restaurants, buying a shit ton of furniture for my new apartment, and maybe getting a dog/cat (still iffy about this last one).

As to the computer recommendation: get an HP envy if you like value and performance or get some form of Mac if you like to spend money.

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JDndMSW

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by JDndMSW » Thu Jul 25, 2013 3:39 am

No laptop recommendations. I was a sheep and bought a Mac 3 years ago and have had no problems with it.

I am on my road trip to school at the moment. Currently in Eugene and will be heading to Portland for a few days before making the 30ish hour drive to Iowa. This summer has been truly magic. I am anxious to arrive and settle in though. Today I geeked out and bought a planner and filled it in with my orientation schedule. I also bought all of my books online even with getting great deals they still cost 450ish.

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Jaqen

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by Jaqen » Thu Jul 25, 2013 10:39 am

sublime wrote:Anybody have laptop recommendations? I don't need anything special, just standard stuff and reliable.
Lenovo Thinkpad.

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buddyt

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by buddyt » Thu Jul 25, 2013 12:53 pm

Jaqen wrote:
sublime wrote:Anybody have laptop recommendations? I don't need anything special, just standard stuff and reliable.
Lenovo Thinkpad.
This. Get a T430 and enjoy the peace of mind that as long as you take reasonable care of your laptop, you will probably not have any issues with it. As an IT consultant I've worked on lots of different notebooks, and nothing compares to a true Thinkpad.

Getting a 13" MacBook Air wouldn't be a bad decision either if being trendy is a priority and you don't mind wasting the cash.

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by dkb17xzx » Thu Jul 25, 2013 2:55 pm

buddyt wrote:
Jaqen wrote:
sublime wrote:Anybody have laptop recommendations? I don't need anything special, just standard stuff and reliable.
Lenovo Thinkpad.
This. Get a T430 and enjoy the peace of mind that as long as you take reasonable care of your laptop, you will probably not have any issues with it. As an IT consultant I've worked on lots of different notebooks, and nothing compares to a true Thinkpad.

Getting a 13" MacBook Air wouldn't be a bad decision either if being trendy is a priority and you don't mind wasting the cash.

how about the sony viao fit?

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by sublime » Thu Jul 25, 2013 11:33 pm

..

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KD35

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by KD35 » Fri Jul 26, 2013 1:13 am

sublime wrote:Thanks for the recommendation.

I don't care much about being trendy. I have a 4-5 year old mac Mini that is still my "desktop" but I don't know that the increased compatibility would be worth the increased cost. Also, I am more familiar with windows OS.
There's a bunch of threads on this...but basically you just need a computer that works running word, onenote, or whatever note taking device you use, as well as whatever exam software/website you'll use for finals.

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Nova

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by Nova » Tue Jul 30, 2013 8:58 pm

Here are some general tips I just wrote for friends. YMMV. HTH

1. Dont stess about cold calls. They are no big deal. Dont waste your time over preparing for class so you look good on the cold call. No one is actually paying attention to what you say. Try to keep your eye on the prize, which is the final exam.

2. Dont over contribute in class. No one likes that person. Theres a lot of material to get through, and usually when students comment or ask questions, it gets the lecture off track. The worst questions are hypothetics ("What if X..."). If the prof wanted to talk about a particular hypothetical, they will bring it up themself. Dont ask questions in the last 5 minutes of class, let the professor wrap everything up.

3. Find friends to study with, even if all you do is sit next to them in silence in the library. Reading and outlining all day can get really lonely really fast if youre on your own.

4. Its a competition. Almost everyone will be friendly, and at the very least civil, but at the end of the day everyone is competeing for the A. This is why having a close group of friends is so important. Kind of like survivor. People arent going to be freely handing out their outlines. Thats their work product; their playbook. No one wants to give their competition their playbook. It can get cliquey. Youll want to find friends that you can mutually benefit from. I had two friends in my section who I shared everything with (outlines, practice tests, notes, model answers). We would talk about the assignments in depth,answer each others questions, challange each other to do better, and encourage each other to keep working. We were each others best resources, and all definitely did better becasue of how much we were able to help each other.

5. Everyone is going to be smart. Its kind of amazing actually; to be in a room with so many smart people. Some curves are very tight. For most people, to do well, theyll have to work really hard and be really efficent with their time. There are only so many hours in the day. There will be people who study 12 hours a day. Studying 70+ hours a week isnt necessary, but in order to out perform people that do, youll have to be super efficient.

6. Read ahead. its makes everything less daunting when you dont have to read for the next day, but instead you choose to read to stay ahead. Plus, youll reinforce the laws more, becasue youll read it, brief it, let it sink in, and then review it quickly again before class. I actually read and outlined all of property class by the end of week 4. This was a huge relief, which gave me time to reinforce the lessons several more times over than everyone else.

7. Read the lesson in a supplement after you read the lesson in the case book. If it wasnt in the casebook or lecture, ignore it. These are the ones I would recommend:

Torts: Emanuels

Contracts: Emanuels

Con Law: Chemerinsky

Civil Procedure: Glannons

Property: Understanding Prop, Gilberts

Crim: Dressler

8. Find out what kind of final youre going to have immediately and tailor your studying and preperation accordingly. Is it a 3 hour exam? 4 hour? 8 hour take home? Is it all essays? How many essays? what does a model answer look like for their exam? What scores points on their exam?

9. Do practice tests. They are not fun, but it is the only way you will get better at articulating the law and applying law to fact in a sophistocated manner. Dont wait till 2 weeks before the exam to start practice testing. As soon as you finish a unit (for example, intentional torts) you should be able to practice writing essays on the topic.

EXAM BANKS:

http://lawmedia.pepperdine.edu/exam/examlookup.php
--LinkRemoved-- ****MY FAVORITE
http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/services/exams/

http://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/fac ... /Old_exams

http://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/fac ... o/Oldexams

I would also highly recommend the Siegels series, which is a book of essay prompts and model answers. http://www.amazon.com/Siegels-Contracts ... 0735556865


10. Outline as you go. Once you finish a unit, go back over it, pick out whats important, and outline it.

11. Make attack outlines for easy access to the law.

12. Read getting to maybe and the leews primer immediately if you have not. These give you a foundation for how to write essays and how to extract the most important lessons from lectures/casebooks/supplements.

13. Prewrite answers to exam questions. DONT TELL ANYONE YOURE DOING THIS. Because its a great strategy and almost no one uses it.

14. use some sort of organizing system for you notes, whether it be onenote or the equivielnt for mac. It saves a lot of time.

15. Enjoy yourself! For some 1L year will be hell. However, 1L year can be a very rewarding experience if you let be.

For fun: http://ponyuplaw.tumblr.com/

16. Use TLS forums. lots of good insight. Here is a collection of guides http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 3&t=123092

17. look at online case briefs and outlines to compare your extracted law to theirs.

http://www.boalt.org/outlines/outlines.html#civpro

http://www.4lawschool.com/casebrief.htm

http://www.onelbriefs.com/

http://www.lawnix.com/

http://www.invispress.com/law/

http://www.ilrg.com/students/outlines/ ***REALLY GOOD CASE BOOK SPECIFIC

http://legalthree.com/law-school-outlines/

http://lawschool.mikeshecket.com/
Last edited by Nova on Tue Jul 30, 2013 10:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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kay2016

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by kay2016 » Tue Jul 30, 2013 9:16 pm

That's a pretty great comprehensive post Nova!

Thank ya!

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Nova

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by Nova » Tue Jul 30, 2013 9:30 pm

No problem :mrgreen:

Regarding prewrites,

Prewrites are basically templates where you fill in the blanks. Basically you should make a template for every possible situation, and then simply fill in the blanks with the facts of the hypo and then make up some the reasoning on the spot. The key to acing issue spotters for me was definitely prewrites, which allowed me to just plug in facts and analysis quickly. This gave me an advantage because I didn't have to think about how to word what I wanted to say.

Everyone in your class is going to know the elements of Negligence are duty, breach, cause, and damages. The key to most torts exams is to spit it out faster than everyone else so you can sue more people over more issues. For example, here is my negligence template, which i repeated probably 20 times over the course of 4 hours. Remember that you are not trying to write prose, your trying to be efficient and apply as much law to fact as possible:

For each bullet, I would also argue the opposite, such as for the first bullet below, "D would argue he did not have a duty to act with reasonable care becasue X wasnt foreseeable"

Duty
• D had a duty to act with reasonable care to P because he is a foreseeable person, evidenced by X
• D had a heightened duty of X because.
Breach
• D did not act with reasonable care because a reasonably prudent person would not have X, but rather Z.
• The utility of Ds acts were high/low because X.
• It was a foreseeable risk of injury because
• Applying BPL, P would argue the probability of loss, chance X, would outweigh the burden to prevent X
• D would argue that the burden of X would be greater than the probability of loss, X, because.
• There was (not) RIL because
• It was (not) neg per se because

Prox Cause
• There was actual causation because but for [conduct] the [damage] wouldn’t have occurred
• [Injury] was probable consequence of X because
• [Injury] was naturally foreseeable consequence of X because
• [Injury] was uninterrupted because X
• D would argue the harm is out of scope because
• D would argue X

Damages
• Because the breach of duty is the the prox cause of Ps damages , they should they win their suit, they would be entitled to X.

ETA: I am not talking about trying to predict answers before the exam and prewriting reasoning. What I mean by prewrites is writing out the [sub]elements into sentences that are ready for application.
Last edited by Nova on Tue Jul 30, 2013 10:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Samara

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by Samara » Tue Jul 30, 2013 9:35 pm

Nova wrote:Dont over contribute in class. No one likes that person. Theres a lot of material to get through, and usually when students comment or ask questions, it gets the lecture off track. The worst questions are hypothetics ("What if X..."). If the prof wanted to talk about a particular hypothetical, they will bring it up themself. Dont ask questions in the last 5 minutes of class, let the professor wrap everything up.
So much this. Feel free to talk in class (professors usually like it and may bump up your grade if you are on the edge), but say your piece and move on. And try to keep it on track as much as possible. No one cares about your opinion or personal experience. Anecdotes are okay if they are funny or short and relevant.
Nova wrote:Prewrite answers to exam questions. DONT TELL ANYONE YOURE DOING THIS. Because its a great strategy and almost no one uses it.
:roll: @ don't tell anyone you're doing this. You think no one has thought of it before? There's a good reason no one uses it and that's because it's a waste of time. Unless you have a professor that just wants you to recite the black letter law (I seriously doubt any professor at a top school is looking for this) focus your time almost solely on the application of the law. It can be helpful to write out some sort of decision tree to hang the application on, but you should be spending a very small amount of time explaining the law. So small that pre-writing is not going to save you any time on the exam.

Also, what you describe sounds like something that would be very much against the honor code at my school so proceed with caution.

ETA: LOL at repeating your negligence standard 20 times. That is completely unnecessary. You definitely do not need to explain the law more than once. Just refer to your earlier explanation. Your exam must have been a bitch to read.

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Nova

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Re: 0Ls: How are you preparing for school this fall.

Post by Nova » Tue Jul 30, 2013 9:38 pm

Nova wrote:Prewrite answers to exam questions. DONT TELL ANYONE YOURE DOING THIS. Because its a great strategy and almost no one uses it.
:roll: @ don't tell anyone you're doing this. You think no one has thought of it before? There's a good reason no one uses it and that's because it's a waste of time. Unless you have a professor that just wants you to recite the black letter law (I seriously doubt any professor at a top school is looking for this) focus your time almost solely on the application of the law. It can be helpful to write out some sort of decision tree to hang the application on, but you should be spending a very small amount of time explaining the law. So small that pre-writing is not going to save you any time on the exam.

Also, what you describe sounds like something that would be very much against the honor code at my school so proceed with caution.
I just mean its not an obvious strategy that most people think of or use.

And as far as being an honorcode violation....

its basically writing your outline out in essay form. I dont see how that could be an honor violation.

Seriously? What are you waiting for?

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