This Weblog Is Going Downhill Fast: A Post About Issue-Spotting on Law School Exams

It was in the early weeks of my law school career that I decided the key to first-semester success was becoming good at issue-spotting.  Of course, I didn’t hear this from a law professor, since the professors at my school generally preferred to keep the first years in the dark about things like how to study for exams, thereby increasing the general state of terror in the hallways.

I’m not sure where I learned about issue-spotting, but it was probably from a book about taking law school exams, a sort of book that I recommend all 1Ls purchase at once.  Otherwise, you’ll risk wasting a lot of time studying in ways that won’t matter to the grade you’ll receive on your exam.  And when your entire grade is based on the result of a single exam, as is usually the case in law school, it's critical to learn early in the semester how the exam actually works.

What’s Issue-Spotting and Why Is It Important?

Generally speaking, law school exams contain only a couple of “fact patterns” such as a lawyer might encounter in real life.  The fact patterns, like this one from a Harvard contracts exam, generally feature a protagonist with a problem.  Reading through the fact pattern, you must then figure out, in a process called issue-spotting, which legal rules are relevant to determining the protagonist’s rights and remedies.  The appropriate legal rules—and their correct applications to the facts—form the basis of an essay answer in which you take a stab at solving the protagonist’s problem.

The mistake many of my fellow law students made was to focus only on the legal rules in preparing for exams.  They thought that if they knew all the legal rules backwards and forwards, they were guaranteed a good grade.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t true.  Even if your memory of the rules was foolproof, it meant nothing unless you were good enough at issue-spotting to know which rules to use on the exam.  You could have a photographic memory of the rules, in other words, yet still do poorly on the exam.

How to Change Your Study Method to Emphasize Issue-Spotting

How did this knowledge change my approach to studying during the first semester of law school?  I figured I’d have to learn the rules anyway, so I worked at committing them to memory week by week.  (If you’re not good at memorizing, buy one of those paperback books that teaches you to turn concepts into pictures.)  The rules went into my class “outlines," which I tried to work on every night even if it meant spending less time on the daily reading.  For that, I learned to skim. 

My outlines did not merely contain rules.  In fact, it wasn’t the rules that were as important to me as were factual examples.  The rules, in fact, are pretty meaningless except in the context of factual examples.  Here is an example from my contracts outline:

Rule: If the offeree’s “acceptance” is conditioned on the offeror’s assent to additional terms, it’s a counter-offer.

Example: A makes an offer to B, and B accepts but adds, “This acceptance is not effective unless prompt acknowledgment is made of receipt of this letter.”  There is no contract, but only a counter-offer.

In coming up with the factual examples, I used the cases we studied in class, examples from the professors, and the fact patterns used to illustrate the rules in the Restatement books (which are themselves nothing but very well-written outlines).

Next, Divorce the Rules from the Outline, and the Fact Patterns from the Rules

A law school outline contains a set of rules more or less in the order that they were presented in class.  If you learn and memorize the rules like this, you may be unable to recall them easily if separated from the context of what came before and after each rule in the outline.

This can be a problem since the rules you’ll need to answer the exam might come from anywhere in the outline.  In addition, simply memorizing rules puts the emphasis on the rules rather than on issue-spotting.  But on the exam, unless you spot the correct issue, you won’t apply the right rule. 

To mix things up to approximate the way issues and rules occur randomly on an exam, I turned my outlines into flashcards.  Although commercial flashcards were available, the homemade variety was a better summary of the actual class.  They were easy to make by simply copying my outline and cutting-and-pasting it onto index cards: the example fact pattern went on the front, and the issue and rule went on the back.  Here is an example of the method, again from contracts—

Front: A sends B an offer which is misdirected in delivery and arrives four weeks late.  The offer is dated.  Can B accept the offer?

Back: Issue: delayed offer.

Rule/Result: If the offeree knows or has reason to know of the delay, the period of time within which a contract can be created by acceptance is not extended.  Because B knows the date of the offer, B cannot accept unless he can do so within the time which would have been permissible had the offer arrived seasonably.

If you emphasize factual examples when you study, the issues will leap out at you when you read the fact patterns on the exam.  This method worked well enough for me that I remained in the top 1-5% of my class throughout law school.

Find and Use Shortcuts
 
Admittedly, there is only so much time for studying.  I decided early on, however, that if something wasn’t going to help me on an exam, then I didn’t need to bother with it.  I skimmed the reading and learned to brief cases quickly.  I used whatever commercial study resources were available to help with issue-spotting.  I didn’t do any “extras” unless they were necessary for the exam.  I certainly didn’t memorize case names, for example, unless some professor specifically said it was required (and it was never required, as I recall).

Know What To Do With the Exam After You Spot the Issues

You can’t do well on a law school exam without being an expert at issue-spotting.  But you can be an expert at issue-spotting and still do poorly on the exam.

All the issue-spotting does is tell you which rules to apply.  But you must also know the rules, know how to apply the rules to the facts, and know how to organize your exam answer so that it’s readable.  Obviously, you can’t stop with issue spotting.  Take the time to learn what makes a good law school exam answer—for example, with resources like these—long before you walk in to take the test.

Comments

[Jeremy Richey]

Evan, how long has it been since you were in law school?

As a current 2L, I can verify that this is still very good advice.

First politics, and then exam advice. I wonder what in the world will be next :)

[Evan]

Jeremy: Thanks for the verification, which is much appreciated. Alhtough I graduated in 1990, I have it on good authority that law school doesn't change very much from year to year.

[second career]

You didn't need to know case names. Sadly, over here in Hong Kong, we DO have to know case names! (I think it's a British thing.) Nevertheless, good advice on exam prep; thanks!

[Alan]

Aye, excellent advice! Fortunately only two of my four classes have exams this semester.

[Federalist No. 84]

I always used the "Law in a Flash" series. I found them to most most helpful on final exams, since there are thousands of issues to stop. And it saves my brain to let someone else create the issues for me.

[Evan]

No. 84: When time was a problem, I found the Law in a Flash series helpful too. And when I wrote once about having flashcards in my car, it was that type of flashcards about which I was writing.

[Lashlar]

Bless you. This advice will, I hope, guide this unworthy mortal in his toils towards becoming a lower-rung demon. :-) I second what Jeremy said, this is very useful advice.

[butthead]

Excellent post.

I call it fact-spotting. As you read through an exam, realize that every single word has been chosen deliberately, and then ask yourself why those choices have been made. Each fact is often a separate issue, so make sure there's no sentence left blank as you annotate the exam.

[idwsj]

This is great. I definitely need to try and build this into my outlines.