Using Case Briefs From the Web:
One difference between going to law school today and going to law school in the Dark Ages concerns the case briefs available for free on the web these days. Lots of students have posted their outlines and case briefs online, and they're all a Google search away. Maybe you don't feel like working your way through the mysteries of Pennoyer v. Neff? Don't worry — if you google Pennoyer v. Neff, Mike Shecket's case summary is the first thing to pop up. If in doubt, just download it to your laptop and bring it to class. If you're called on, you can improvise with Mike's help.
I want to hear from current law students about how often students rely on such resources, both in and out of class. I have four specific questions:
I want to hear from current law students about how often students rely on such resources, both in and out of class. I have four specific questions:
1. How often to do you either read online casenotes before class, or download them and bring them to class in case you're called on?Thanks for the feedback. My special request is for practicing lawyers not to weigh in with comments. I'm sure lots of lawyers have opinions on whether students should rely on such resources, or have fond memories of what it was like to go to law school in the 1980s, but right now I want to find out about today's student practices.
2. Roughly what percentage of your classmates do so?
3. How many times in your law school experience has a student been called on for a case, and responded by reading from what you're pretty sure was an online casenote that the student downloaded from the web?
4. When (3) happened, do you think the professor realized what was happening? If they did, how did the professor respond?
Probably 10% of my classmates did so.
I saw someone read from the internet once or twice.
Professor either didn't notice or didn't care.
If you can't find one of those outlines, the next step is probably to buy a commercial outline, not go on the web. I only went on the web for federal criminal law because i couldn't find anything else. the outlines I found were horrible, so i threw them away
When I use them, I download them in class. We have in-class wireless internet access. I wouldn't bother with one if I've read before class, which I usually do. I prefer drawing my own conclusions about a case.
I'd guess 10% use them constantly and another 10% use them occasionally.
Maybe 5 times. It's pretty rare that students are particularly obvious about it.
The professor probably detected a certain lack of preparation, but probably didn't know that the student got the case brief off the internet. The only times professors reference the internet in class are when they tell us not to play games in class or shop online. (We, of course, still play games and shop.)
2. I've noticed about 1/4 to 1/3 of classmates have casenotes printed out but this may or may not be an indication of whether they read the case as assigned.
3. Never noticed an obvious quote from a casenote.
4. N/A
I generally don't want to rely on another student's take on a case (until outline time), so I'll stick with either Lexus' or Westlaw's product (not that these are genuinely more accurate or helpful than, for instance, Mike Sheckel's summary.
This is not to say that if my casebook contains a poorly written 10 page opinion I will not bag the case, rely on a canned brief, and hope I don't get called on. TI may also rely on the canned brief if I am in a terrible time quandary.
Many, if not most of my classmates access these briefs. I have no idea how they use them.
2) Very few. It is more common for people to get briefs from older friends, and to use those. But even there, I doubt it passes 10% of the class.
3) Not being sure what the online briefs say, I'm not sure I can comment. But there have been times where students are called on, and read from their briefs, in language which did not sound like their own (too smooth, too professional)
4) Some would ask additional questions, trying to see if the student actually knew the case. Others would just move on if the student had answered the question correctly.
At least here at Yale, students seem to rely on IMing or emailing one another for answers in class, or consulting class outlines made by the previous year's students, much more than using briefs online.
1. Last year I used the online materials whenever I needed a night away from pouring through my casebooks. It was a nice way to step back from the incessant studying, but I usually only used them for the facts of the case. I probably used them four times a semester.
2. If I had to guess, I would say 20% of my classmates used them at one point or another last year.
3. I only remember one student who read from his computer in Property class. It was apparent that he was not prepared, and his words sounded very "thought out." (which is not indicative of 1Ls!)
4. It was painfully obvious that he wasn't prepared, and the professor made him suffer the consequences. In the end, it didn't appear to be worth the embarassment for him.
Should I feel bad about occasionally using these materials? As a Professor, what goes through your mind when a student does #3?
Generally, most of us don't rely upon these briefs exclusively, but they definately help when trying to sort out the meat from the fat (or is it the substance from the dicta now that I'm in law school?) when reading through the cases.
I never feel confident enough to raise my hand if I haven't read the case though.
I don't see a lot of other people doing it, and if they have been I haven't noticed.
I tend to grab them from Lexis most of the time, but we're reading Pennoyer v Neff next week, so that link will be most helpful :-)
2) None that I know of, but I haven't grilled them on it.
3) I've never seen this and been aware of it. I think I'd have trouble telling the difference between reading one's own brief and reading one online, since a sensible student will paraphrase rather than reading. Of course, it may be that I'm just not paying close enough attention.
4) NA
As for other students' material becoming available on the web, that just sounds like a modern update to the time-honored traditions of sharing class notes and outlines... if you find good ones, it can rescue you when you're called on and guide you towards success on an exam, possibly saving precious hours. If you get mediocre ones, it's your hide at risk and you'd better hope that your own preparations will make up for the incompleteness or misinformation. (Oh, and if you get good ones, and think that excuses you from studying hard for your exams, it won't take more than one bona-fide law school issue spotter to disabuse you of that fantasy).
I've noticed quite a few students (between 10-20%) actually put the lexis summary in their class notes. I don't think that's helpful as the class and professor may focus entirely on just one aspect of the case and not the general summary.
Lexis and westlaw also market their summaries to lazy law students, offering the "brief-it!" option which leads you to just the summary of the case.
2. Roughly what percentage of your classmates do so? No one that I've ever seen.
3. How many times in your law school experience has a student been called on for a case, and responded by reading from what you're pretty sure was an online casenote that the student downloaded from the web? I've heard what sounded like a Lexis summary, but not a casenote prepared by a past student. I HAVE heard tons of answers straight off of last year's star student's outline.
4. When (3) happened, do you think the professor realized what was happening? If they did, how did the professor respond? Yeah, a couple of times I think the professor had heard it stated that way before, but they just moved on.
What has been more common in my personal experience is students using online resources (but not online casenotes) in class to rebut some ridiculous factual claim a professor made.
2. not sure...but it seems low
3. I've never noticed
4. N/A
not sure my answers are representative, I'm such a luddite that i dont even use my laptop in class
I do all my own briefs on paper though, I don't like using the laptop.
2) None that I know of.
3) Never that I've notcied.
4) Never that I've noticed.
Now I'm only a 1L and I've only been here a handful of weeks. I know some people read prepared briefs before class. But most of my professors don't allow laptops in class, so students would have to print briefs out and bring them in.
I've found that I do a lot better relying on my own work.
To answer the questions, though, I did that maybe twice a week in the second semester of 1L year, so about 15% of the time. I suspect that 80% of my classmates did so as well. As for reading directly from the outline during class, I think it happened pretty regularly in one class and very rarely in others, so I will guess probably 20 times over 15 weeks. The prof, I am certain, knew that we had last year's outlines, but he never seemed to care.
2. It's a rough guess, but I'd say maybe 5%.
3. Just once so far.
4. Everyone in the room realized what was happening. I think everyone was either shocked or amused that a student would be that tacky. The professor kind of chuckled and then asked for the student's own words.
I've probably watched a student read directly from online casenotes two or three times and suspected it a few more than that. The professor either didn't care, or knew the student was quoting another source, but didn't address it. Knowing the students in question, it's not as though their own words would have done more to contribute to class understanding.
And to echo the point of a poster above, far more common is the use of the Internet to challenge a professor on a ridiculous 'fact' they throw out in the middle of a lecture. I've done it several times myself. Of course infinitely more common than even that is the use of the Internet to check email, send instant messages, and read news, especially in those classes where the professor makes little to no effort to engage the students.
2. I'm not sure, but I'd guess at least 50% if you include old outlines and notes from other students who have had the class before.
3. More than I care to remember. In particular for one class there was a transcript of the class down to the corny jokes the professor made that people would use to answer the questions. I knew about it but didn't have one because this professor rarely called on anyone.
4. The professors either didn't know or didn't care the times I've seen it.
1. Never
2. 0-5%
3. Never, but students have read from an outline
4. No
2. A lot? I've seen students carrying around printed commercial outlines / brief books, although obviously those can't be hidden if you are called on. I think IMing each other is a bigger deal -- if everyone is in a big chatroom and giving hints for whoever is getting called on, that can be better than a brief. Or worse, if they give bad advice...
3. A few times? From IM is more common.
4. Never for downloaded materials, almost never for IMs. Sometimes a student would be totally honest and say "someone is IMing me and telling me to say ...".
I knew Mike Shecket, whose brief of Pennoyer v. Neff (a case that is death personified) began this post. He was in my class at Ohio State (Moritz Law). He decided after his 2L year to drop law school and become a biology teacher. He still has a blog at blog.mikeshecket.com, mainly personal rather than substantive stuff. But I enjoyed this recent post of his:
Famous law school dropouts!
- President Lyndon Johnson
- President William McKinley
- President Franklin Roosevelt
- President Theodore Roosevelt
- President Harry Truman
- President Woodrow Wilson
- Almost-President Al Gore
- Martin Luther
- Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
- Steve Jackson (of Steve Jackson Games)
- Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
- Ray Manzarek of The Doors
- Limited founder and richest man in Columbus Les Wexner (apparently an Ohio State law school dropout)
- Carly Fiorina (Former HP Chairman and CEO)
- Donald Rumsfeld
- Karl Marx
- Novelist/murderer Michael Peterson
I admit to pulling up a brief just once—I misread the reading assignment and needed to look up International Shoe. I found the brief helpful only to the extent that when I then pulled up the actual case, I could focus my reading (I only had a few minutes between classes to look over the material).
I haven't seen any evidence of students using canned briefs of any kind in class, but if they were it might not be obvious. Very few of my classes are explicitly Socratic (at least two have assigned students on call) and in the one that is, the professor doesn't usually ask for a recitation of the facts/issue/holding.
I think students at my school are more likely to pull the actual case up on Lexis or Westlaw than pull up an online brief.
I think students at my school are more likely to pull the actual case up on Lexis or Westlaw than pull up an online brief.I admit to pulling up a brief just once—I misread the reading assignment and needed to look up International Shoe. I found the brief helpful only to the extent that when I then pulled up the actual case, I could focus my reading (I only had a few minutes between classes to look over the material).
I haven't seen any evidence of students using canned briefs of any kind in class, but if they were it might not be obvious. Very few of my classes are explicitly Socratic (at least two have assigned students on call) and in the one that is, the professor doesn't usually ask for a recitation of the facts/issue/holding.
I admit to pulling up a brief just once—I misread the reading assignment and needed to look up International Shoe. I found the brief helpful only to the extent that when I then pulled up the actual case, I could focus my reading (I only had a few minutes between classes to look over the material).
I haven't seen any evidence of students using canned briefs of any kind in class, but if they were it might not be obvious. Very few of my classes are explicitly Socratic (at least two have assigned students on call) and in the one that is, the professor doesn't usually ask for a recitation of the facts/issue/holding.
2. 5-10% often -- 20% once in awhile
3. Maybe 5 times all early in the 1L year.
4. Don't think they knew or care -- more likely they didn't know.
My CivPro called on me the first day, and though I'd read Gordon v. Steele thoroughly and understood the facts and reasoning and interaction therebetween, the prof wanted to know exactly where to find the fact that domicile was determined on the day the action was commenced. As it turned out, it was in a citation that my adrenaline-addled brain could not recall.
2. Maybe 10%, but I don't have a good sense of it.
3. Never noticed this.
4. N/A.
As others have mentioned, if I'm going to look up web resources to replace or supplement what I've prepared myself, I'm going to do it in class, rather than beforehand.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
...p/t 2L...
2. I'd say the number of people who downloaded casenotes by Googling was pretty low, but it was very common to trade previous class' notes via email.
3-4. I witnessed another student read from downloaded notes (from a previous year, not from a random site), and the Professor called him on it and that was pretty much the last time it ever happened. The prof had changed the question slightly and was able to recognize the previous year's distinctive answer.
What do I use? High Court Case Summaries, if they've got a copy for the book I'm using. The pages are perforated! You can tear them out and put them in your 3-ring binder.
"What else?" you ask. Well, for any prof that's taught more than once, there are outlines from much more industrious students than me. They wrote down every question the prof asked and the answers that didn't get slapped down, Socrates-style.
I've also been known to hold an Examples and Explanations or other hornbook on my lap while questioning was going on. [BTW, anyone else ever have a prof that taught directly from Understanding X?]
How often? Rarely. Okay, occasionally. I'm a 3L. I'm a 3L with a job already. And a clinic and a cert to finish. And sometimes I don't get the reading done the night before and I don't want to drop a note. (Because I know that as little as I'm getting out of the Socratic method at this point, I'll get even less out of listening to others being Socratized.)
Tomorrow, I'm dropping a note.
ps. A couple of times in 1L, I forgot my torts book and of course, when you forget your book you will be called on. [Is that your plan, professor?] I had pulled up the Lexis version and the prof asked, "Where do you find support for Thus-and-So?" So, I, having read the case before, and reskimmed the case in the previous minute, starting rattling off the part of the case that fit. Of course, it's the part the book elided. I was right about what the case said. No fair trying to hide the ball in the ellipses!
(I do think, however, that few classmates did read off Internet briefs. I think we had the assumption that what the profs wanted was not the basic stuff that would be in them, but something deeper that we'd have to come up with on our own.)
Since I've been a 2/3L, however, on many occasions I've consulted mine and my friend's notes and outlines during subsequent classes' discussions. Again, it seems like the reasonable and indeed responsible thing to do.
Believe it or not, I think that many law students, at least in more traditional law school settings, often feel that reading/skimming the actual case (5-20 pages)
a) doesn't take all that long, with some practice;
b) takes only somewhat, not significantly less time than looking around for the case online/in a supplement and then reading the summary;
c) is more protection against being caught underprepared on the 2nd or 3rd socratic question by the professor if that professor "stays on" the student in class;
d) is part of the overall eduaction (some)one is paying for in law school.
The practices of other students varies, and seems to depend a lot on the professor (the more socratic, the more likely we'll read) and the subject matter (the more interesting, the more likely we'll read). In my 1L property class, probably over half the class used the Casenotes summaries for Singer's Property textbook. VERY OFTEN, when asked to recite the facts, students read them verbatim from the Casenotes brief. The professor either didn't catch on, or didn't care, because he never said anything about it.
1. --Never. I like to do my own work. Not so much out of any pride or work ethic, but I just think that the only way to improve the skills involved is practice. Reading what someone else has put together, even if it's excellent, just doesn't get the job done. Second, by doing it myself, I can tailor the notes to that particular professor, the ideas he emphasizes, pet issues of his, etc, and disregard things that I don't think he feels are important, so I don't have to scan over them when I'm fussing with my notes.
2. --The 10 percent figure sounds pretty accurate, maybe up to 15 percent. Of those, I'd say a third rely heavily on the downloaded notes, the rest use them either to supplement their own notes, or only in a pinch (ie, they went drinking the night before and didn't read the case)
3. How many times in your law school experience has a student been called on for a case, and responded by reading from what you're pretty sure was an online casenote that the student downloaded from the web?
--I'm still in my first month, but I've only heard it happen once or twice. (I knew the students personally, and they seemed unusually articulate about a difficult case)
4. --I don't think they caught on.
I noticed a couple "reader" posts doubting whether it really is true that most law school students don't use web case briefs. One such doubting "reader" suggested that the law students who read and respond to this website might be a self-selecting group.
This is my first time to go to this site (my brother, a lawyer, asked me what I thought of this topic), so I am not a member of the supposed self-selecting group of Volokh readers (never heard of this site before, to be honest). Yet I agree completely with what pretty much every other law students has said. At least at NYU, we don't use anonymous case briefs from the web. Some people get the case summaries from LexisNexis, which seems useful (although I haven't done that myself), but why would we trust some random case brief on the internet? I think that most people actually (gasp!) read the cases or -- if caught unprepared -- attempt to fake it.
I'd say that this is simply the wrong topic. Law school problem issues related to the web might include the rampant use of email and IM during certain classes (those classes where the teacher rambles on without calling on students), but there is not really any problem of students reading from downloaded case briefs (at least at NYU). Sorry.
I've definitely used them to replace reading cases. I am so busy, and reading cases is probably the least useful thing I spend time on. Plus I have professors that think it's cute to assign like 100 pages of reading in a night. If I could figure out a way to completely eliminate reading the actual cases, I would do it. Unfortunately, the online briefs just aren't good/prevalent enough yet.
As far as how many other people do this, I don't know. Surprisingly few. But more and more of the people I know are doing it once they see how helpful it is.
For my part, I was hoping that other people would do the same thing I did (imitation, flattery and all that) and that I would be getting e-mails by now saying "Hey Mike! Your briefs suck, dude! From now on I'm going to somenew1l.betterthanmikeshecket.com!"
Also, not to put anyone down or butter anybody up, but I definitely get a disproportionate number of hits and e-mails from lower-tier law schools, who may in turn be underrepresented as Volokh readers.
As a recent graduate of a law school, not in the 1st tier, I can tell you that my fellow students did not hesitate to use any supplement they felt could help them in their course of study. I can also tell you that some students were successful using canned briefs, and some were not.
I think it's ok to mention that so-called "lower-tier" law students might be underrepresented as commentors of this blog or a particular website, but it is pure speculation to say that also extends to readership.
Lastly, I would note that there are professors who have used canned briefs in class as well!
2. 30% or so.
3. really can't say...because most students do not just read from casenotes, rather they paraphrase and have at least skimmed over the case in question.
4. a good friend/classmate of mine did, and i am sure that it was pretty oblious, but the professor made a point of having students READ from their written brief, so even the most prepared student sounded silly reading from the paper.