Transcript for:
Legal Education and the Socratic Method: Lecture Notes

MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: So, first, I want to say congratulations. You are starting your legal educations, which is a very exciting time in your life. And not only that, you are doing it at one of the top law schools in the country. So good for you. Good for you for doing the work that was required to get in here. [APPLAUSE] All right. So the work, unfortunately, is not over. It has just begun. So what we want to do is prepare you for the kind of work that you're going to have to do in the law school classroom. So I'm going to take on that first topic-- what is it that you need to think about to prepare before you even come to class? All right. So let me ask this question. By a show of hands, how many of you have seen either Legally Blonde or The Paper Chase? Put your hands up in the air. And how many of you thought, yikes, I don't actually want to be in one of those classes? Put your hands in the air. Yeah, I see a lot of hands. OK. So those movies, that's the Hollywood version of the Socratic method. So the Socratic method is the signature pedagogy of American law schools. It's that way of teaching where we ask you to read a judicial opinion, which is called a case, and then you come to class. Then the professor calls on you, and you are asked to answer questions in front of some of your classmates. So that is understandably an intimidating proposition for a lot of people. So why do we do this? Why have we been teaching this way? We've been doing this since 1870. And the logic is that this is the best way to instruct law students about how to think like lawyers. Before 1870, you used to come to law school, and it was just lectures. You would sit there, and you would take notes, and law school was like two years long, and you would just sort of self-report your progress. There wasn't even an exam period or anything like that. So maybe that sounds really good to you, but I guarantee you that you would not be a very good lawyer coming out of a system like that. So instead, what we are asking you to do is to immerse yourself in the cases and to think about them critically. We're asking you to pull them apart, and then you come to class, and we're asking you to explain them to us. And by doing that, you are going to have a better understanding of how pieces work and what it is that persuades judges. The other reason that we still cling to the Socratic method is because it is a rhetorical education. It is giving you a chance to practice speaking out loud in a stressful situation. So even though that can be very unpleasant, it is something that is really useful to learn. So that's a way to teach this to you. Now, I promise you that most of the professors here are very, very nice people. And I don't think you're going to encounter the Socratic method the way you might have seen it in The Paper Chase. It's usually a much more gentle experience than that. And, in fact, you're going to encounter plenty of classes where people don't even use the Socratic method at all. Especially as you get into your upper level classes, you might find yourself in a lecture or a class that uses group discussion or a simulation class-- that's the kind of class that I teach-- or clinics. So this won't be the only thing that you're going to be encountering in law school. But since the Socratic method seems particularly intimidating, that's what we thought we would focus on because we want to demystify it for you. So what do you need to know to do well in a Socratic class? So my first tip to you is that you are going to have to keep up with the reading. So law school is not like college. When I went to college, I was an English major. So that meant I did a lot of reading, but I did it mostly at the end of the semester. So I'd go to lecture, and I'd take notes about some book that I have not read. And then at the end of the semester, I'd catch up and I'd read the book. And then I'd look back at my notes, and I'd think, oh, OK, now this makes sense. And then I'd go take the exam, and it was fine. You can't do that in law school. And that is because a legal education is cumulative. You will not understand what is happening in class if you haven't done the reading. And you won't understand what's happening in class this week if you didn't understand what was happening in class last week. And so that means you need a system right now that is going to let you keep up with this reading. So here's my suggestion to you. Instead of thinking about this like an extension of college, you might want to think of law school as your new job. So just as with any job, you're expected to show up for work at a certain time, say 9:00, and you're expected to stay there and work until the end of the workday. That's your job for law school as well. So some part of your day is you're sitting in class. But for those other hours of your work day, you are reading. You are keeping up with the workload. That kind of discipline of just chipping away at it every single day can really help. You probably have also noticed-- we told you to read Lucy versus Zehmer for this morning's session. And in doing that, you probably noticed it's hard to read cases. It takes a little while. It's longer than if you were just reading a novel. And that is because the language is unfamiliar. Sometimes cases are very dry. We have all had that experience of reading the case and then getting to the end and thinking, what? I have no idea what that was about it. And so then you have to start all over again and read it a second time. That is perfectly normal. You should expect that, especially in your first semester. So that means that you need to carve out some extra time because you may find yourself having to read the material several times through in order to understand it. I promise you that it gets easier the more you do it. By the time you are 3Ls, you will just be whipping through these cases. It won't take any time at all. But it takes some practice. And then eventually, you will find, oh, this language is actually familiar. Oh, this is a structure that I understand. Oh, I get what it is I'm supposed to be looking for. But this first semester, just know that it's going to take time. So this isn't the semester to be signing up for extra shifts at the Gap or something. This is the semester to be spending a lot of extra time doing your reading. All right. As you are reading, you are going to be reading for particular things. And so here is a little secret of reading a case. It kind of ends up being the same stuff over and over again. So as you are reading a case, you want to look for-- here is my laundry list for you. You want to look for these things. All right. So one of the things you want to look for is you got to figure out the facts of the case. So that means, who did what to whom? Why are we here? Who is the person who sued? What is the story? So just figuring that out can sometimes take some time if the case is really old. You want to know what the procedural posture is. OK, so the procedural posture means, what court are we in? So what kind of judge are we talking about? And how much room does that judge have to maneuver? So if you're reading an opinion that was issued by a trial court judge, then that judge is looking at things fresh and has lots of room to say what the facts are and so forth. If, instead, you're reading an appellate case, which is usually what you're reading for most of your law school classes, then what you will find is that the appellate court is not always allowed to look at things anew. So if the case involves an issue of fact-- so that means, was this witness credible or not? Is this fact true or false? Usually, in most appellate courts, you're going to find that the appellate court is only allowed to review that to see whether the trial court's decision was clearly erroneous, whether the trial court just abused its discretion. Otherwise, they got to kind of defer. If you think about it, it makes sense. It's because the trial court judge is the one who was actually there and better able to assess things on the ground. However, if the opinion that you're reading is about an issue of the law-- so that means an interpretation of a statute, for example, trying to figure out what the law means-- then usually the courts of appeals have more discretion. And so usually you will see a paragraph that will say, "This is a de novo review," which means from the beginning. We're looking at this all over again, looking at this anew. So the reason you're going to care about that is it lets you know how much wiggle room have I got here-- did the judge have to issue this opinion. So as you read cases, you eventually are going to find there's kind of a system, and you will start to look for the paragraph that tells you what the procedural posture of the case is. Another thing you're going to look for, you're going to try to figure out what is the holding of the case and what is dicta. OK, so the holding means exactly what the court said in order to resolve the dispute in front of it. So the holding, that ends up being important because it is going to bind future cases. So that means-- you heard from Professor Kendrick, I think, about the fact that we are in a common law system. So that means the law isn't just statutes. The law is also what judges say about those statutes. So when a judge has said something and that becomes part of the law, that means the judges that come after are going to have to follow what that judge said. And so you want to think about it, what did the judge actually say? And the part that the judge said that was necessary to resolving the dispute in front of him or her, that's the holding. That's the part that actually is going to bind future courts. Judges say other stuff, too. In every case, there's going to be extraneous conversation. That stuff's called dicta. And so it can be persuasive. It can be beautifully articulated. Sometimes dicta becomes very famous and becomes very influential in how people think. But it's not binding. So an example would be, let's imagine that we have a judge who is talking about a case in which somebody drove a car through a park and did doing that violate the law. So the judge writes about the car being driven through the park. But in the course of issuing this opinion, the judge also kind of extrapolates and says, well, if the guy had driven a scooter through the park, then maybe this would be a different thing. All right? So then let's imagine the next case comes along, and the next case is a scooter case. All that stuff about the scooter, it was all dicta because it wasn't necessary to resolving the dispute about the car. So you as a lawyer, you would use it if it helps you. And you would try to say it's great reasoning. It makes a lot of sense. But it's not the holding. And so the judge doesn't have to follow it. All right, so that part of figuring out what is the holding, what is dicta, that's going to take you some time. You're going to spend some time on that, especially the first month or so of school, because it's not always that clear. And you will see lawyers arguing about this. Lawyers will try to argue that things are part of the holding. And other will say, no, no, it should be more narrow than that. The point is, reasonable minds can disagree about these things. So that is great fodder for classroom discussion. You're also going to want to pay attention to issues of precedent. So issues of precedent can mean you have figured out the holding of the case that you were asked to read. And so therefore, what are the other cases that are going to come after going to have to follow? Or you may see in your case the court struggling with the cases that came before it and trying to figure out, all right, do we have to follow these other cases? Are they precedential? Or can we somehow distinguish what came before? Can we somehow say it doesn't apply? If you have a case from the US Supreme Court, you might even see the Court say, you know what? We don't like that precedent. This is no longer good law. That phrase, by the way, when I was a 1L, used to confuse me. I remember somebody in my study group saying, this isn't good law. And I thought, does that mean it's not a good law? What it means is it's not the law anymore. It's been overturned. So it could be that the Supreme Court says, yeah, here's what the precedent was. But you know what? We don't like it. It's no good anymore. It's not good law. We've got a new rule, new system, new precedent. So if you see any discussion about that, like how the case fits into what has happened historically, you want to pay attention to that. The reason that precedent's so important in a common law system is you really do want changes to happen incrementally. If judges can sort of make things up out of whole cloth every single time, then you would have a system that is little more fragile. So you would have people not really knowing how to behave because they wouldn't really know what the law is. It would depend on your particular judge. You'd have people at the mercy of the individual whims of a judge. So a judge just doesn't like you. He doesn't like the looks of you and then make it up. So we don't want that. That's why we have precedent, so that judges' discretion is a little bit cabined. And then it's also just for purely practical reasons. If judges had to decide things anew every single time, the workloads would become onerous, and courts would just slow down. So that's why precedent is pretty significant. So if you see conversations about that, you should be paying attention. You will also want to think-- so you figured out the facts of the case, the story. You will also want to think about what facts are really important to this particular holding and what facts aren't. So there are going to be some that are just really extraneous. There are others that are really critical. So a favorite line of questioning of law school professors is, what if I change this fact? If this central fact is different, does that change the holding? And so that, you need to be thinking about. What did this holding mean? That will help you figure out whether a changing of the fact makes a difference. Another favorite line of questions, I'll give you a new hypothetical. I'm going to give you a new fact pattern. How would this case apply to this new fact pattern? So, again, that is really testing, what are the parameters of this holding? For a lot of this stuff, there's not necessarily a right answer. The point about being a lawyer is that you should be able to argue it different ways. That's what you're practicing. Are you able to argue this so that you can make a persuasive case that, yes, this would apply to this new fact pattern or, no, no, it wouldn't? It is smart to think about where what you're reading fits into your course overall. So it's easy to get mired in the weeds and just, like, put your head down and do the reading. And if you do that, you may miss some big picture themes in your classes. So a really good habit, periodically pull out your syllabus and look at it not just to see what your next reading assignment is. Look at it to see, what is the framework of this class? Like, where are we in this story? So sort of thinking globally about what did this individual case kind of add to my body of knowledge about contracts or torts or whatever it is that you're studying can be very helpful. I mean, you might get questions about that in class. And then finally, you will want to look for text that is important. So here is text that's important. If the court says, "We are now establishing a new rule," or if they say something like, "Here is a three-pronged test," highlight it. That text is really important. And so those are things that the professor will ask you about. And when you're answering the questions, go to the actual language. Don't paraphrase it. Read the actual language because probably what you're going to get into is a parsing of that language. What does this language mean? All right. So those are the things that you are looking for, and they're pretty common not matter what your topic is. Those are the sorts of things you're going to see in cases. As you are reading and looking for these things, you will also, of course, be taking notes. Now, to survive in a Socratic classroom, you want to create notes that will help you answer questions. So I think it's helpful to think of your notes as a visual aid that you can look at quickly to be able to find the information that you want. So I'm going to tell you about my system that I used when I was a law student. And it is just a model. It's one way that you can do this. It is not a perfect system. It's not the only system. So you absolutely could figure out your own idiosyncratic system, and that's fine. The point is just to have a system, just to have some sort of routine that will let you create a visual aid that is going to work for you while you are in class. So the visual aids that I tended to rely on are the ones that I've given you as a handout. So one is a piece of paper. That's the first page of this case we asked you guys to read, Lucy versus Zehmer. And then the other is a one-page summary of the case. So that one-page summary of the case, it's called a brief. So you may have heard of briefing a case, which is what we're going to talk about next. It's different-- so briefing a case, it's not the same thing as a legal brief. So sometimes you'll hear people talking about filing a legal brief, and what they mean is like filing a document in court that is an argument. And it's totally different, even though the words are the same. Briefing a case means you are taking notes about the case. And your goal in briefing the case is to be able to get through class, to be able to answer questions about the case. All right? OK. So let me also say this. So your peers may tell you not to bother as you move forward. You may have older law students that will tell you, eh, don't waste your time briefing cases. Just read the cases, move on. And I am going to tell you that I think that is a mistake. Briefing cases does not take very long. But it is tremendously helpful because it is a discipline. It is making you take this case and break it down into its component parts. So that is yet another way of interacting with the materials, yet another way of synthesizing it. And it is so helpful when you're called on. When you are feeling stressed out, it's so helpful to have this document in front of you because it probably has the answers on it for you. All right. So let's talk about how this brief and these notes worked, and the case that we're going to use is Lucy versus Zehmer. I hope you guys all read this case. But even if you didn't, you'll be able to follow along. So Lucy versus Zehmer is a Virginia case. Here we are at the University of Virginia, so we should tell you what the world of Virginia is like. So this is Virginia. This is the Ferguson Farm in Dinwiddie County. It's 470 acres, and this farm was owned by Mr. Zehmer and his wife, Ida. And it was coveted by Mr. Lucy. He wanted this farm really badly. So on December the 20th, 1952, Mr. Lucy entered a restaurant owned by Mr. Zehmer, Ye Olde Virginnie, with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. And the two men sat down and began to drink, and they began to talk. They said things like, "He was high as a Georgia pine," and "Great balls of fire." This is how they talk in Dinwiddie County, according to the states. [LAUGHTER] Waitress testified that the men were drinking right much. Ultimately, at the end of the conversation, Mr. Zehmer wrote out a bill of sale for the farm. So here is the bill of sale. You can see that it is on a restaurant check. And it says, "We hereby agree to sell WO Lucy the Ferguson Farm complete for $50,000, title satisfactory to buyer," and at the bottom, it's signed by Mr. Zehmer and by his wife, Ida. All right, so that's the story. That's what happened. So if you take a look at the case itself-- so here is the first page, which you've given you as a handout-- you can see this stuff is in there, but it's kind of jumbled. Like, as you're reading the facts of the case, they're all mixed stuff. They don't have it set out in an orderly way like here's what the consumer says, here's what Mr. Lucy says. It's all kind of mixed up. So what I was trying to do when I was reading cases is highlight things so that it would make sense for me. So here's how I would have come up with highlighting like this. I would've read this case the first time through without touching it. I wouldn't have highlighted a thing. So I would've read it through just to figure out what the heck is going on. What is the story? And the reason that I'm going to suggest that to you-- don't highlight the first way through-- is because otherwise, you will highlight everything. And then you will end up with a case where every single thing is underlined, and that does not help you in class. All right. So you read it through once. I got it. I got what the story is. Now you read it through again, and then you start using your highlighting to help you find the specific text that you might want. So you can see I always would circle the defendant and the plaintiff. Oh, and by the way, people like to use little-- the defendant as like a little triangle and the plaintiff is like a little pie symbol. You'll see that in people's notes. So if you want to be really official, you can use that. [LAUGHTER] All right, so you circle their names. And then I have underlined also, what is the issue in the case? So that means, what is the thing that the court is being asked to resolve. And I go ahead and underline that in the casebook as well in case the professor really cares about that specific language, in case he or she doesn't want you to paraphrase it. So I'm looking for that. And down here at the bottom, this is the paragraph that tells you the procedural posture. So this is the one that says they're asking for specific performance. That means the guy wants the farm. He doesn't just want his money back. He wants the actual farm. And it says it's on appeal. All right, so I've highlighted that. So the other thing I've done here, though, is since this is a case where there are a lot of facts, I might use multicolored highlighters to try to sort those out. So what I did here was anything that was helping Mr. Lucy, I'm highlighting in green, and anything that's helping Mr. Zehmer, I'm highlighting in yellow. And that's because the way the court's written the opinion, it's all conflated with each other. So Mr. Lucy, he's got things like Mr. Zehmer actually wrote this contract, that he took the time to write this thing. That contract's got pretty clear terms. It says we're going to give this to you, $50,000. They signed it. Both of them signed it. He got his wife to sign this contract. And then there's the fact that Mr. Lucy's been after this farm for years. So not a huge surprise that he's serious. He really means this. So Mr. Zehmer, that's the stuff that's in yellow. And so that's things like he thought it was a joke. They've been drinking. Once he realized Mr. Lucy was serious, he said, "No, no, no. I'm not selling this to you. I think we're joking. I'm not going to take the $5 you seem to be offering me to bind this contract. No, no, no. I didn't think it was for real." So those things I've highlighted. OK, so you can take this page, and then you can compare it with the brief, which is the other document I've given you. So the brief, it's just taken this information and put it into a form. So this literally was a form. Yeah. INTERVIEWER: I think some of us are missing this-- MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: Oh, no. OK. Have we got-- Sarah, do you know if there more copies of the handout? SARAH: [INAUDIBLE] MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: If you are missing these handouts, would you please put your hand in the air? So it looks like the down-front folks and the folks back there. SARAH: The down front and the people in the back, OK. MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: OK. Keep your hand in the air. I'll just keep talking, but keep your hand in the air till you get your handout, and that way, we'll be sure that you have it. But the handout is just this. It is what I'm showing here on the slide. So you're not missing any information here. All right. So if you compare them side by side, though, you'll see that all I've done is I've just taken this information from this case, but now I'm putting it into a one-page form. And this literally is a form. This was the form that I used to use in law school. The idea of having a form is it's a discipline. Again, it is making you make sure that you find every single time, who are the parties, what is the issue, what is the procedural posture? Just that discipline of answering those questions for yourself over and over again helps you learn how to read these cases. But then the part with the facts, those I put in order of this is for Zehmer, and this is for Lucy. And the reason I might do that for a case like this is because these facts are pretty fun. This could be one where the professor would say to you, "Can you make the best argument that you can on behalf of Mr. Zehmer? Can you make the best argument that you can on behalf of Mr. Lucy?" So having those facts sorted out can be really useful. All right. So what happened here? The court said Mr. Lucy wins. He gets the farm. And it's because, you know, who can read Mr. Zehmer's? Mr. Lucy gets to have the farm because it seemed like it was all good. And so a contrary ruling, you could have bad effects, and we'll let Professor Geis get into that. But that's essentially what this brief is. OK. So the point of this is to help you in class. This is not your outline. This is not going to be helping you-- it will help you on your exams, too. Going through this process will help you on exams. But right now, all you're thinking about is, like, how am I getting through my classes? And then you go into class. All right. So here you are in class. And let's imagine that you are the person who has just been called on. So what do you do? So the first thing you do is you realize, you got this. You did this work. You got this brief. So you have already thought through this case in some detail. So this is going to help you. And then you take a deep breath. And I'm going to advise you to tune out your other classmates and just look at the professor. The professor is asking you questions. Ignore everybody else because that's not helping you. They're probably not feeding you the right answers. Listen to the professor and just think of it as a conversation. Most of the professors are going to try to help you. They're going to try to give you a hint about where it is you're trying to go. A lot of these questions that you're being asked, there isn't necessarily a right answer. So really, what they're asking you to do is to think. So this is your chance to practice. So that involves just taking some deep breaths and realizing you did do this work. I'm also going to suggest that you practice. Try to answer with some confidence because this is a professional program. You are learning to be lawyers, and lawyers have to speak with confidence. The only way you're going to get that is to kind of fake it till you make it. So try answering the questions as if you know what you're talking about, even when you don't. I also want to say-- so law school, we sometimes will ask you to disagree with each other. Sometimes we're talking about things that are very fraught. Sometimes we're talking about things people care deeply about, like abortion, first amendment rights, gun control, things like that. And so you will hear positions that you don't agree with. In fact, we may ask you to argue positions that you don't agree with. And so I want to say right now, this is the beginning of your professional network. These folks that you're in class with will also become lawyers. They will remember you and have positive feelings about you if you've treated them with respect. So law school is a place to practice disagreeing agreeably, disagreeing respectfully and professionally, not tearing people down. So when your classmates are talking, you want to realize it is hard. It is hard to answer questions. So you don't laugh at each other. You support each other. After class, you say, good job, good for you. Because you really will do a good job. You really do know the answers if you just have a little confidence in yourself. All right. So let me-- oh, actually, one last thing I want to say. I wish that I had thought of this as a student, but I didn't. I thought of it when we were talking. If I could do it all over again, I would have one more category in my brief. And it would be, what happened in class? Having the discipline to go back to that brief and just having one more paragraph where I wrote down, this is what the conversation was, I think would've been tremendously useful. Because usually in the conversation, you were going to begin to figure out, what are the doctrinal implications that this professor cares about? It might help you figure out why you're looking at this case in the first place. And so that means-- certainly if you're answering the questions, you're going to go back and write something about, what questions did you answer, what do you say? But even if you're not the person on call, it means you need to be listening. You cannot check out. You have to be listening. Because if you are not fully engaged, you won't know what to say about why this case was important and what happened in class. If you stay fully engaged, you're going to get so much more out of your legal education. All right. I'm going to turn the floor over to Professor Geis now, who's got his own PowerPoint here. [INAUDIBLE] [APPLAUSE] GEORGE GEIS: So good morning. INTERVIEWER: Good morning. GEORGE GEIS: We are ready to turn to our next topic in contract law. And this is called the agreement. Now, remember that in order to have a legally binding contract, you have to have an agreement. We don't impose contracts on you by fiat of law. But it's an agreement between two private parties, typically, that turns into something that's legally binding. And we can usually break it down the agreement into two parts, the offer and the acceptance. So for example, you might make someone an offer. I'll paint your house if you give me $1,000. And then the person you're speaking to might say, sure. And then you have your offer and acceptance. And then you have a contract. They might not say, sure. They might make a counteroffer. Well, how about if I only pay you $950 instead? And then the conversations continue. But the important part is that we need an agreement. Now, there are some nuances, however, to the agreement process, which brings us to the critical case of Lucy versus Zehmer. So Hannah Donna, let me set the stage for Lucy Versus Zehmer. Lucy had long coveted the Ferguson Farm. He had made several offers to buy the farm in the past, and these offers had always been turned down. They had not yet arrived at a deal. Late one Saturday night, Lucy drove up to Zehmer's restaurant, Ye Olde Virginnie. He passed through the gas station and walked into the diner and decided to wait around and look for Mr. Zehmer. Can you tell us briefly what happened next? HANNAH DONNA: Well, Lucy offered about $50,000-- offered $50,000 for the Ferguson Farm to Zehmer. And they talked for about 40 minutes, shared some drinks, and then Zehmer wrote and signed a contract on the back of a receipt detailing the transaction. He actually wrote two contracts because the first one didn't include his wife. It said, "I hereby sell" instead of we. So he tore it up and rewrote it. He then convinced his wife to sign, whispering in her ear that it was a joke so Lucy couldn't hear. Zehmer gave the contract Lucy who offered him $5 to seal the deal. But Zehmer didn't accept the $5. Lucy took the contract the next day to his brother and then to a judge on the Monday, which is two days later. GEORGE GEIS: OK. So we've got a lot of back and forth between these two parties, and I think what you said is exactly right. Lucy went in, negotiated with Zehmer for a while, and then ultimately, they drafted, and the Zehmers signed this agreement or this something on the back of a bar bill where they agreed to sell the farm for $50,000. And as you said correctly, Lucy tried to pay $5 to seal the deal or bind the bargain. And Zehmer, at that point, said, hold on a second, right? We don't really have an agreement. And Zehmer later went on and tried to deny that there was a contract. Why does Zehmer say there wasn't a contract? HANNAH DONNA: Well, he says that was a joke. GEORGE GEIS: OK. HANNAH DONNA: And that he and his wife both knew it was a joke. Lucy should've known it was a joke. So it wasn't a real-- GEORGE GEIS: We were joking around, right? We were just horsing around. This wasn't a real binding commitment. And so Zehmer denies this. And this means now that the entire issue of the case centers around whether we have a real offer and acceptance, whether there's really an agreement that would then give rise to a contract. Now, what does Lucy want? What is Lucy suing for? HANNAH DONNA: He wants performance of the contract. GEORGE GEIS: Performance, right? Specific performance. So he's not looking for money damages for breach of the contract. Lucy actually wants this farm. Lucy would like to have the right to buy the farm itself, and that's what he's suing to try to get. Now let's cut to the chase. Is Zehmer bound contractually? HANNAH DONNA: Yes. GEORGE GEIS: Yes. Why? HANNAH DONNA: The objective giving of contracts, it doesn't matter what your subjective intentions are. Whether there's a promise depends on external or objective interpretation. And since Lucy could not have known that Zehmer was joking in his mind, the contract holds. GEORGE GEIS: OK. So the court sets out a rule of law called the objective test. And it says we are going to look at what a reasonable person would think happened under the circumstances. And if it looks to a reasonable person like there was real offer and acceptance, then we're going to deem there as being real offer and acceptance. Now, Hannah, what facts led the court to believe that a reasonable person would not think this was a joke? Why does the court come out this way under the objective test? HANNAH DONNA: Well, Zehmer wrote out not one but two contracts and clearly ripped up the inappropriate one and rewrote it so that the wife was included. They bargained over price. Both Zehmer and his wife signed the contract. And Lucy immediately the next day took action on the contract to go about buying the farm. GEORGE GEIS: OK. So they talked for a while. They haggled back and forth. They wrote it down. We could add maybe a couple of other things. They actually thought through-- I've got a copy of the contract here. I'll flip it so you can see it a little more. They thought through the title provisions, right? The title has to be satisfactory to the buyer. They had both he and his wife go back and sign it. So they negotiated for quite a while. And ultimately, the court was convinced by a variety of things that any reasonable person would think this was a real deal, and, therefore, it became a real deal. Now, Alex Hayden, let me jump over to you. Imagine that you had the case, and you were going to argue for the Zehmers. You're representing the defendants now. What sort of story would you tell? How would you describe the situation or describe what was going on in order to make out the case in the best possible life for the Zehmers? ALEX HAYDEN: Sure. I would point to the fact that Lucy brought the whiskey with him to the farm. It seemed a little underhanded to bring an intoxicant when you're trying to purchase property, especially that late at tonight. GEORGE GEIS: OK. ALEX HAYDEN: I would also point to the fact that Lucy wanted to pay $5 to bind the bargain and, in addition, the amount effort he went through to make the contract-- signed by the wife and perfectly titled. It seemed like he was kind of anticipating there might be problems with this later on. GEORGE GEIS: OK. ALEX HAYDEN: And then I would also-- GEORGE GEIS: Let me stop you there. Doesn't that show that they were seriously negotiating back and forth with each other if he actually took the time to bring the wife in? ALEX HAYDEN: That's certainly one reading of it. But I would say look at the objective truth. The court seems to buy more of what Lucy said he was thinking. But I think probably close to the truth would be that Lucy understood that Zehmer wasn't fully committing to this and-- GEORGE GEIS: So what was really going on? I mean, tell it to us in common words. If it wasn't sort of a real serious negotiation-- and I think that's the story you want to tell if you're representing Zehmer-- what would you say was happening in the bar that night? ALEX HAYDEN: Lucy came in with the intention of getting the farm at pretty much any cost if he could do it. GEORGE GEIS: OK. But that sounds like a real negotiation, doesn't it? I mean, do you want to say something a little different if you're Zehmer? ALEX HAYDEN: Basically that he made out with a windfall of $50,000 using the influence of alcohol and-- GEORGE GEIS: All right, so he got him drunk. He kind of really pushed him down that way. Hannah, what do you think? If you were representing Zehmer, how would you describe what's happening? HANNAH DONNA: I would say that Zehmer has several times said he's not going to sell the farm. He's told Lucy several times he doesn't want to sell the farm. And the fact that he, after drinking for 40 minutes with Lucy, finally agreed to sell the farm, Lucy should've known that he was drunk, should've known he would never the farm based on his past. GEORGE GEIS: Based on the past interactions. Well, can't we joke about selling something for years and years and years and eventually strike a real deal nevertheless, especially if the price keeps getting raised? HANNAH DONNA: We can, but the way that Zehmer and Lucy interacted showed that itself was a joke. Oh, I bet you won't sell this for $50,000. Oh, I bet you can't find $50,000. I mean, it seemed like a joke the way that they were. GEORGE GEIS: All right. So maybe-- and I think this gets into a line of reasoning that you'd want to push if you were Zehmer-- you'd probably say-- yeah, and first, you clearly raised the intoxication argument, right? I think that's one that you want to try to press on. But there's another way to explain, I think, what's going on here, which is, look, this was just Lucy sort of needling-- or this was Zehmer needling Lucy to say, I don't think you have the money, right? And trying to kind of press him and tease him and go on and on trying to see if he could just make him cave in the context of a lot of drink. So, Alex, I think that might be another line of reasoning that you would want to pursue. Hannah, imagine that you were the judge and this case came to you. How would you decide? HANNAH DONNA: I would decide for Lucy. GEORGE GEIS: For Lucy? How come? HANNAH DONNA: I think, for me, one of the [INAUDIBLE] factors is the fact that they rewrote the contract to include Zehmer's wife. I think that really shows thought and the fact that this was a real contract and not a joke. GEORGE GEIS: OK, so the fact that they went back to Mrs. Zehmer and asked her to also sign this took it to a level of seriousness that you think turned it into a situation where you'd reasonably understand this as being a binding contract. Now I want to read you a passage from the case related to that. One of the things that happened was that Mr. Zehmer went over at that moment in time to try to get his wife to sign it, and they were talking through. Zehmer came back to where she was standing and said, "You want to put your name to this?" She said, "No." But he said in an undertone, "It's nothing but a joke," and she signed it. Now if Lucy heard that, would that change the outcome of the case? HANNAH DONNA: Yes, because then the outward intention would be known. It would no longer be subjective intent [INAUDIBLE].. GEORGE GEIS: So they, all of a sudden-- right? That might have really change the case. Because if Lucy overheard Zehmer telling his wife, "Oh, this is nothing but a joke," it wouldn't be reasonable anymore for Lucy to think that this was still a real serious negotiation. So did Lucy overhear Mr. Zehmer say that to his wife? HANNAH DONNA: Allegedly no. GEORGE GEIS: Allegedly no. [LAUGHTER] We know more than that. The case actually tells us if you go a little bit further on, and this is closer to the end of the case. Both of the Zehmers testify that when Zehmer asked his wife to sign, he whispered that it was a joke so Lucy wouldn't hear and that it was not intended that he should hear. I think that's a pretty pivotal part of the case because I think you're right. And if they'd said it louder so that Lucy actually heard, "Well, this is just a joke. Honey, why don't you sign it?", then I think that there might be a different outcome to the case. But that's not what happened. And so maybe under the objective standard, we should find there as being a legally binding contract. Alex, let me come back to you. Let's talk a little bit about this result, this result. One of two or maybe three things is really happening here. There's one or two or three things that are going on. First thing that might be going on is that Zehmer might be lying after the fact to try to get out of a deal that was really struck. Maybe there was a real contract that was struck, and now Zehmer is lying after the fact and saying, "Well, I was just joking. I was just joshing. I didn't really, really mean it." Second thing that might have been going on is that Zehmer was really, really joking at that time during the negotiations, and, in his mind, he was thinking, there's no real serious way that I'm meaning to sell the farm. And that might have really been what's happening. And Lucy just sort of didn't understand that. Do we care which of those two circumstances were taking place? ALEX HAYDEN: In a general sense, probably not. I mean, a lot of contract cases are simply setting the standard rules that future parties can understand, you know? Oh, if the rule is you're joking, you have to make sure they're not when you make a contract later. Or it's if you're joking, you have to make it very clear that you're joking. So for future parties, no. Obviously, these parties, yes. GEORGE GEIS: So you're telling me that if we were to somehow look down from above and figure out what really happened, it's possible that Lucy really was in his mind joking and meaning to joke-- sorry, Zehmer really was meaning to joke at the time, and we still don't even care as a matter of law? ALEX HAYDEN: There's definitely an argument that can be made that it doesn't matter, that you're simply creating a rule that we're going to use this objective theory, and going forward, it's what this neutral reasonable observer-- GEORGE GEIS: Well, that's right. I mean, that's exactly what the court says. If you look at how they describe the situation, it says-- this is a few paragraphs, six or seven paragraphs from the bottom. "Whether the writing signed by the defendants and now sought to be enforced by the complainants was the result of a serious offer by Lucy and a serious acceptance by the defendants or was a serious offer by Lucy and an acceptance in secret just by the defendants, in either event, it constituted a binding contract of sale between the parties." Well, what kind of a crazy rule is this? How are we going to bind Zehmer to a contract if Zehmer might not really have meant or intended to enter into the contract? Why don't we instead prefer a subjective test where we say, look, in order to have a contract, you have to have the intent to make an agreement and, therefore, we're going to ask whether both parties subjectively actually had the intent to enter in the agreement. And if they did, then there's a contract. And if they didn't, there's not a contract. What's wrong with that? ALEX HAYDEN: I think there's two issues with that. First is that it makes-- it kind of frustrates the purpose of contract law in the sense you're supposed to be able to plan for the future. You're making these deals to position yourself to have your house painted or to pay your bills with the money from painting it. And if someone can just kind of rescind the contract by saying, "Oh, I was joking," that's pretty frustrating. GEORGE GEIS: All right. So that's, I think, a bigger problem, right? I mean, I make you an offer. I'll sell you my Toyota for $10,000. And you say, OK, and raise the money. And I say, ha, ha. I had my fingers crossed behind my back, right? We have no contract. In my mind, I was thinking there's no way I'm really making the deal. I mean, that's a problem. We want people to be able to behave with certainty when it looks like and should look like to anybody that they reasonably concluded the contract. And that's where I think the objective test is trying to do. That's a critical starting point for offer and acceptance in contract law. Now, Alexander Hoffarth, I want to come over to you because Zehmer has another line of defense, right? The Zehmers are trying to argue, even apart from the application of the objective test in this way, that there's another reason why the Zehmers shouldn't be bound to the contract. What is it? ALEXANDER HOFFARTH: I was too drunk. GEORGE GEIS: I was too drunk. I was high as a Georgia pine, right? There's no way I should be responsible for this sort of an offer and acceptance because I was really drunk. And, you know, Zehmer kind of makes a big deal out of it, right? Zehmer goes back and looks at the bar bill and says, "I can't even recognize my own handwriting. That's how bad I was. I spelled the Ferguson Farm wrong. I couldn't spell satisfactory right. I mean, I didn't know what I was doing." I'm not so sure looking closer at the bar bill that there are any misspellings, but at least that's what Zehmer was playing up. So is this defense going to work for Zehmer? Was there an incapacity defense? ALEXANDER HOFFARTH: No. The court says it doesn't. GEORGE GEIS: OK. Why not? ALEXANDER HOFFARTH: The court says that he wasn't intoxicated to the extent that he couldn't understand what he was doing. And that's really the rule in Virginia. GEORGE GEIS: OK. So the standard we need is that you're so intoxicated that you can't understand the nature and consequences of your actions. As you said, you don't even know what it is that you're doing. Well, what facts does the court use to determine that Zehmer kind of knew what he was doing? ALEXANDER HOFFARTH: Yeah, so I think Hannah already has sort of laid it out nicely, right? The fact that there's two contracts. The first one was in first person. Then he changes it to "we" to include the wife. That matters. The fact that it's written. Doesn't matter that it's on a bar tab. It's still written down. And it has land for money. I mean, that would suggest that he knew what he was doing. GEORGE GEIS: Right. So the fact they went through all of these different actions might lead someone to believe that-- but could you do all this stuff while you were really, really drunk, too? ALEXANDER HOFFARTH: Yeah, I mean, but, again, it's the same sort of thing as what we were just talking about with the joking, right? I mean, if you have a sense that you're capable of making a contract, and that's what Lucy thought-- Lucy was drunk, too. They both were drunk. It's pre-Christmas in Virginia to celebrate. Right? I mean-- GEORGE GEIS: Look. Go ahead. ALEXANDER HOFFARTH: It would suggest that there still can be a contract, even though two parties-- both parties are drunk. GEORGE GEIS: That's right. I mean, you can have a few drinks, and you can certainly make a legally binding contract. At some point, I guess, you'll have drunk so much that you don't understand the nature and consequences of what it is that you're doing. And the court didn't think that the parties got here. Let me ask either the other two students. Do you have any other facts or anecdotes or pieces of evidence from the case that might lead us to believe that the court actually got it right and the parties weren't too drunk? Alex. ALEX HAYDEN: Both parties have a great amount detail about what happened that night. They were pretty particular about who said what and where and who did they talk to, how many contacts there were, what they changed. Just, there's a high level detail that kind of doesn't really add up to it [INAUDIBLE].. GEORGE GEIS: So the court sees [INAUDIBLE] if you were so drunk, how can you then come back and talk in a lot of detail about exactly what happened? There's another nice passage where Mrs. Zehmer told Mr. Zehmer, "Well, Lucy's really drunk. I could tell. Lucy staggered out. Why don't you go drive him home?" Right? I mean, that sort of undermines Zehmer's argument as well, right? Why is she saying, go drive him home, if he is too drunk [INAUDIBLE]? So I think for those reasons-- and, ultimately, if you read the opinion carefully, the lawyer for Zehmer actually conceded that the Zehmers were not too drunk to make a real contract. So the incapacity via intoxication is a side issue. It's not the fundamental issue of the case. Real quick, let me tell you a side story. So I was teaching this case a few years ago. And after class was over, one of the students in the class came up afterwards, and they said, "Professor Geis, I want to tell you a story about something that happened to one of my friends." And my eyes got big because I know that a good story is going to come out, right? It's sort of positioned that way. And they said, "Well, one of my friends was staying up one night having some drinks and surfing the internet on eBay." And I said, "OK. I didn't know that was a thing, but--" [LAUGHTER] "And the next morning, he woke up, and he received an email in his inbox saying, 'Congratulations. Your bid for $48,000 for the Mercedes is the winning bid.' [LAUGHTER] Alexander, is that a legally binding contract? ALEXANDER HOFFARTH: Yeah. GEORGE GEIS: Yeah. How come? ALEXANDER HOFFARTH: Because, again, there was an offer of $48,000 and acceptance of it by the Mercedes owner. The Mercedes owner can't tell that he was too drunk to make the contract. So congratulations. He's got his Mercedes. GEORGE GEIS: So under the objective test, there's at least a pretty good argument that all you saw were these bids going back and forth. How would you know that someone was too intoxicated to do it? Now maybe our poor bidder could make out a claim. I don't know how he would muster the evidence, that I was really so drunk I didn't know what it was that I was doing. But that's a pretty hard claim to make out. So it's possible that that person would be in a lot of trouble, putting aside a sort of special rules that eBay might have on its site related to the whole bidding process. OK. So incapacity is a bit of a side issue. It's relevant, but it's not the main issue. The main issue we have here is the issue of the objective test. We are going to look at what it is that the parties say and do, and we're going to essentially impart a reasonable interpretation. We're going to divine objective truth, what any reasonable person would think that means on the basis of the surrounding facts. And I guess it's fair to ask whether a court can really do this. Is it realistic for us to expect that a judge or a court can somehow divine objective truth from the variety of facts that take place? I mean, this converts issues of fact into issues of law. And I think we're asking a lot in some circumstances for the court to be able to say, well, there's a lot of messy facts like those that are going on in Lucy and Zehmer. But nevertheless, this is what really happened, what a reasonable person should think this means, not that. And really, the way that you think about this objective standard, in some ways, come down to your different theories of judicial reasoning and what the purpose of the law is. And so I want to kind of quickly summarize this case just by introducing two alternative theories of judicial philosophy. The first theory is more of a realist theory or a relativistic theory. And I think it's nicely summed up by a quote from Corbin, who's famous contract scholar. Here's what Corbin would say. "A sufficient reason for comparative historical studies of cases in great number is the fact that such study frees the teacher and the lawyer and the judge from the illusion of certainty and from the delusion that law is absolute and eternal." In other words, a realist judge might say, look, there's lots of stuff going on. And judges have lots of flexibility under the objective test and other rules of law to sort of tailor the outcome to what they think is the right thing to do. And it might depend on their mood that morning what they're going to view as being the objective truth in any given set of circumstances. And if the judge at something different for breakfast, well, then maybe she would have come out slightly a different way. That's a little bit more about a judicial realism philosophy. We should contrast that with more of a judicial formalism. And this could be summed up by another shorter quote by Langdell. And he would say, "Law is science." It's not realism. Law is science. There is objective truth out there. And the role of the judge is to find what that objective truth is. Some judges get it wrong. But if a judge properly understands and applies the facts and uses things like the objective test, they can determine what is the ultimate truth is. And law, therefore, should be understood as akin to science. So I don't think we're going to solve this one today. Just be aware that there are these two alternative conceptions of what judges can and really should do. And the objective test, I think, is one place in contract law where themes like this really come to center stage. All right. I want to finish quickly with one last review case. Hannah, maybe I can come back over to you. Try this. I offer to sell you my Toyota for $10,000. And you say, OK. You bet. We meet the next day, and you hand over a big fat stack of $50 bill, $10,000 worth. And I say, thank you, and I hand over to you my toy Yoda. [LAUGHTER] Are you really obligated to take this action figure under the objective test? Can I do that? HANNAH DONNA: I would argue no. [LAUGHTER] GEORGE GEIS: Why not? How do we know that? HANNAH DONNA: Well, I would say that a reasonable person would assume that when you say Toyota, you're implying your car and not your figure toy Yoda. GEORGE GEIS: Yeah. That has to be right. Doesn't it? HANNAH DONNA: Well, I would argue that it's an information-forcing rule and so the idea of, if it's not what a reasonable person would believe, you would have to disclose it. GEORGE GEIS: OK. So Even if I though when we negotiating upfront that my toy Yoda was worth $10,000 and that that would be a fair price for the toy Yoda, too bad on me, right? Because a reasonably objective person would never-- I don't think-- think that when I was talking about a $10,000 Toyota, I meant that thing over there. I would think we're talking about the car. Now that, I hope, for all of us is a relatively easy one. But it's an application of the objective test. And I want you all to finish by just thinking, how do we know that? How do we know that when we say Toyota it's the car and not the toy? And do we really expect that courts can do that same type of analysis, however we know that, in those much more complicated sets of facts and circumstances and context that usually arise in any contract dispute? All right. That's enough for today. We'll pick it up tomorrow with our next case. [APPLAUSE] [SIDE CONVERSATION] TOBY HEYTENS: All right. Hi. Again, my name is Toby Heytens. This is a deeply weird experience for me for two reasons that I'll share with you real quick. One is it just occurred to me that I was sitting in this room on my first day of law school a long time ago. So this is real weird, the realization that I was-- the room was not this nice then. So you're welcome. [LAUGHTER] I also have this vivid recollection that I vividly remember doing Lucy versus Zehmer in contracts, and I haven't seen Lucy versus Zehmer taught since I was a 1L because I don't teach contracts. So that was also kind of weird. There wasn't a PowerPoint either. So that was exciting. OK. So what I'm going to do is talk to you-- so we've been talking about so far-- Molly sort of talked about preparing for class, and what you just saw with George was sort of the class part. And so you can probably deduce this-- the logical structure that I'm now going to talk to you about is, OK, so class is over, and now what do I do? What do I do after the class is over? Because the class is part of the process, but the class isn't the whole process. And so I want to talk through you with that. The single most important thing I would actually say-- what I want to do is I want to skip to the end. I want to skip from-- imagine that was-- that plausibly could be day one of contracts. I want to skip from day one of contracts to the exam in contracts because then we're going to work backwards to talk through how you spend the time between those two things. The most important thing-- in some ways, I actually think-- when I'm sitting down thinking about my sort of fundamental approach here, the single most important realization to have is that you are not going to be asked to do that again. The thing that you just saw is not something you will be asked to do again. And what do I mean by that? Exams vary tremendously. There will not be a question on your exam that says, state the facts and the holding of Lucy versus Zehmer. There will not be an exam question that asks you to stay the facts and holding of Lucy versus Zehmer. And it is extraordinarily unlikely that you will get a question on the exam that is literally just the facts and holding of Lucy versus Zehmer. So fun fact-- I actually took the Virginia bar last month for reasons. [LAUGHTER] And on the bar exam, on the Multi-State, there's this multiple choice component of the bar exam. There's a 200-question multiple-choice test. It is actually the case that on the Multi-State portion of the bar exam, there will be some questions that are literally real cases and asking you what the right answer is. It won't say, this is Lucy versus Zehmer. But they'll give you the facts, and if you're a sufficient law nerd who remembers cases in this way, you may find yourself sitting in the bar exam in three years going, this question is just literally Lucy versus Zehmer. This question on the bar exam that I'm being asked to answer now is just Lucy versus Zehmer. But you will not be asked to do that on a law school exam. You will not be asked, what's the right result in Lucy versus Zehmer? And you won't be asked a question that is literally just the facts and circumstances of Lucy versus Zehmer where your only task on the exam is go, oh, this is Lucy versus Zehmer and I'll just repeat everything we learned about Lucy versus Zehmer. What you're going to be asked to do, what you're going to be asked to do is to apply what you have learned to different fact situations. Fundamentally, that's what you will be asked to do when you're evaluated on the exam at the end of the semester. And I'll take a few minutes here to talk about the different ways that you'll be asked to do this. But I think it's most important at the beginning to see fundamentally what you will be asked to do almost irrespective of the type of evaluation, the type of specific question. You will be asked to apply what you have learned to a different factual situation. So one way you might be asked that is what's known as an issue spotter. You're going to hear this. This is the essay. This is probably still the dominant method of law school exam questions. So you're given a fact pattern. I mean, here's an example. You all took the LSAT recently. Imagine the reading comp section of the LSAT, and imagine that you're given a fact pattern of three, four, five, six paragraphs. And then at the end of that, there will be a question. And it will say-- it could be some level of generality. It could say, analyze all of the contract issues raised by the previous six paragraphs. It could be a slightly narrower question. Under the facts and circumstances that's given, have the parties entered into a binding agreement? So that, then, isn't asking you about damages. That's not asking you about defenses. But, right? It'll give you a fact pattern, and then you'll be asked to analyze the fact pattern in the course of writing some sort of essay. That's probably still the dominant method of law school exam question. Another approach you might get is that you might have a fact-- and this is something I use-- you might get a fact pattern, and then after that fact pattern, you might be asked a series of shorter, more targeting questions, a so-called short answer, where it basically says, analyze this issue in a paragraph. Analyze this issue in a paragraph. Analyze this issue in a paragraph. Now, another type of short answer question is that you're not given six paragraphs. You're just given one paragraph. And then you're asked to do a quick little analysis of that one paragraph. And other possibilities that you get-- short answer, multiple choice, fill in the blank. But fundamentally, these are all the same kind of thing. You're going to be asked to take some information that you've learned during the semester and then to apply that to a different situation than the ones that you've discussed in class. So one variation, by the way, just a flag-- some of you will remember this from your study for your 1L exams. I mean, one approach is to ask a fact pattern that looks a lot like Lucy versus Zehmer, but it is not, in fact, Lucy versus Zehmer, that I have changed one or two or three facts of Lucy versus Zehmer. And now your job is to explain whether those changed facts affect the outcome of the case. So you'll be asked to do that in a lot of different ways. But what you're going to be doing is ask to apply what you've talked about and learned about in class to a different situation. So here is one immediate action item. Some of you will have books that have questions in them, that have practice problems in them. When I do civil procedure-- I'm not doing that this semester. But when I do civil procedure, my book has a lot of practice questions in them. If your book has practice questions, do them. Do them before class. Go through those practice questions. And try to figure out, what do I think is the right answer to that practice question? One reason to do that-- again, none of you are going to have me for civ pro, so I'm not giving this away. One reason to do that is because your instructor might be like me and they might ask about them in class. So that goes for Molly's being prepared for class. One reason to do that is because they might ask these questions in class. But even if they don't, the value of doing it ahead of time on your own is that it makes you try to extrapolate back and think about the bigger picture implications of the fact pattern that you're reading. So that's what you're going to be asked to do at the end of the semester. You're going to be asked to take the facts and circumstances and to apply them to a different set of situations. And for me, what this does is it helps illustrate your entire objective from the moment class ends until the moment you take the exam. Another thing that you're going to be asked to do is to combine-- and this isn't just on the exam. You're going to be asked to do this the next day. So we've talked about one day of class. But that wasn't the last day of contracts, right? That was the first day of contracts, the third day of contracts, or the fourth day of contracts. And what there's going to be is a next day of contracts. And I think the single most important thing that I try to impart, one of the single biggest challenges that I find in helping people get through this material-- and it builds off something Molly said-- these days build on each other. Every single day to one degree or another builds on every single day that came before. And one of the sort of biggest challenges I have and one of things I encourage you to be constantly trying to figure out how to do is to realize today is not an island. Today is connected to yesterday, and today is connected to tomorrow. And so when you're preparing for and reading the material for tomorrow, you should also be asking yourself, not just trying to understand this material, but how does this material connect to the material you've already done? And it's not even necessarily linear. Again, I'll use the example of the course I'm most familiar with. So people who've had Alexander had civil procedure with me. So he can attest to this. There's some material that we do at the very beginning of the semester and then we come back to in a gigantic way at the end of the semester. And the last four or five days of class draw incredibly heavily on material from the very beginning of this semester. And that's just because that's how a lot of legal topics are. They're integrated. There is no beginning, middle, and end. They're all sort of a web of material. And so you can't really understand part of the web without understanding the other parts of the web. So I think that's just something mentally to be thinking about, to be asking yourself of the act of reading and learning, how does this relate to what we've done? So that's the objective. Now I want to talk you through three ideas about how you go about doing this. One, this builds off something Molly said at the end, of which I endorse firmly. You need to promptly-- and this is actually vitally important. In order to do as well as you possibly can, you need to promptly review and revise your notes post-class. Ideally, ideally, it is the same day. But I think in order for you to get the full benefit of this, it is no later than the end of the week. So one possibility-- and your schedules are all going to be different. You might have a day that you have three or four long classes. You will not have time to do that on days that you have three or four long classes. But what you will have-- I mean, if you have those days, you also have days that you have fewer classes, right? There will be some days you have more classes, some days you have fewer classes. You'll also have these weekends. But I think, ideally, in order to really get the benefits out of this, this is something that you need to do on a regular recurring basis not more than a week after the class. I mean, one approach that I've heard people using to success is every weekend, you just sort of go back and you review the previous week. And you sort of try to integrate everything that happened the previous week. Let's talk about what you're doing. So the first thing I think you're going to want to do is you're going to want to find some way of integrating what happened in class to the notes that you took before class. And I'll tell you, as a 1L, I experimented with a variety of different ways of doing this. You need to figure out what way works for you. But so you're going to have the material you wrote before class. You're going to have the material you wrote during class. And you want to put those two things together. And when I say put those two things together, I mean really two things. One, there's going to be material from class that wasn't in your pre-class notes. This is the sort of what we learn after the class material. You want to pay attention to that stuff. I mean, I think one of the things about both doing well on the exam but also just learning the material is picking up on the stuff that your professor seems to think is important or mentions or emphasizes, right? Think back about class. Look at your notes from class. Think back about class. What did we really dwell on? What did we spend a lot of time on? In particular, what did we dwell on and spend time on that either wasn't in the reading or was emphasized much more in class than was my impression of it from the reading? Do you know what that is? That is a signal that that is something your professor thinks is important, and your professor is the person who writes the exam. And your professor is the person that will be deciding what questions to ask in class tomorrow and the next day and the next day. And they're basically telling you, I think this material is important. You should pay attention to figuring out what they think is important. Relatedly, you should start removing things that were in your notes that, with the benefit of hindsight, don't seem like they were all that important. This is going to take a lot longer at the beginning. In four months' time, you will look back, and you will think how much better you are at this after four months, and after a year, it's unbelievable. But one of the things you're going to be doing, going through this process for the first time, it's a process of figuring out of what is important and what isn't important. So I promise that your first sets of notes will have a lot of material that you will go back and look upon post-class, and you'll go, you know, as it turns out, that wasn't very important. As it turns out, I wrote down a bunch of things in my pre-class notes that literally never came up in class. And now with my understanding of what happened in class, that material wasn't super important, as it turns out. You should take that material out of your notes. Once you've decided that it's not important, take it out of your notes. The goal here-- we're going to talk about outlining in a way. But for, me outlining is a process. It's not an outcome. And part of the process-- there's no contest. It is not a contest to have the longest outline possible. [LAUGHTER] You're not going to get a grade on your outline. There's no A for effort in how long your outline is. I actually think-- when I talk about notes and preparation material and things like outlines, how long should it be? It should be not one word longer than it absolutely has to be. Right? Which means if there's something in there that's not important, you should take it out. You should remove it. It is about editing as much as it is about adding. So remove things that aren't important. And another thing that you're going to start to do-- this is the third, and I would do this even in the immediate post-class period-- you want to start moving away from taking notes for class to taking notes for an exam or taking notes for the future. So here's a tagline I thought of that might be helpful for you to think about it. You want to move away from outlining or briefing the case, and you want to move towards outlining the material. And the material is not the case, and the case is not the material. So in other words, I'm not going to be asked a question about Lucy versus Zehmer, the case. But I might be asked a question about offer and acceptance. We might talk tomorrow in class about offer and acceptance. And I might be asked a question about the objective theory of contract, and I probably will be asked in class in the future about the objective theory of contract. And I might talk about intoxication again. So I want to talk about intoxication and things like that. But moving away from briefing the case to outlining the material. And so then, this sort of relates. This is the process. These aren't clearly divided up. But the other thing that I think you're going to want to be doing is practice integrating the material. You want to work to integrate your understanding of the material throughout the semester. You want to start building your mental map, your mental web of this area of law. And the individual days are data points. But the goal is to use those data points to build the web between the data points because that's how you're really going to learn and master this material. And it's how you can be able to do well on the exam. So here's one very specific tip that I use, that I always tell people when I teach civ pro. So you're going to read future cases. So what are future cases? Future cases are fact patterns. What am I going to be asked to do on the exam? I'm going to be asked to analyze a fact pattern in all likelihood. So one of the ways that I can use future cases is I can use them to review my knowledge of concepts that the case isn't technically about. So for example, say that in a future class, I'm asked to read-- this is really horrible because I'm going to try to come up with an example off the top of my head. It's not going to go very well. But so, OK. So there's a famous contracts case about like-- George, this the mill shaft. Is that Hadley versus Baxendale? So there's a case about where somebody, like, contracts with somebody to fix the mill shaft that does grain. I don't know. Anyway, that case, when you read it, when you read it, that case, you're going to read it to talk about damages, right? That's not wrong OK. That's a case about damages. But what happens is, is somebody hires somebody to fix something for them, and they don't fix it in a timely manner, and it harms them. And the question is, how much money should they have to pay? You're going to read that case to talk about damages. But when you read that case, there's no reason that you can't use it to review Lucy versus Zehmer, which is to say, everybody in this case is assuming-- in Hadley-- that there is a valid contract between the parties, and the only question is how much they have to pay. OK. Stop. Why am I sure about-- let's just go through it. Everybody assumes there is a valid agreement. Why is everybody sure there's a valid agreement? What does a valid agreement require? It requires offer. Was there an offer? Well, yeah. Someone brought in a broken mill shaft to people who fixed mill shafts. And was there acceptance? Yes. People who are in the business of fixing mill shafts took the broken mill shaft and said they'd fix it. Does that sound like an exchange of an offer and acceptance that an objective person would think and tends to-- yes, it does. But notice what I've done there. In the course of reading that case, that fact pattern, I've used it to review my understanding of offer and acceptance from a previous class. And I think the discipline of doing that is actually really valuable, both because it'll help you reinforce the material you already know, and it will force you to start approaching the case the way you would approach a question on the exam. Because imagine I was given the facts of that case as a question on an exam. I would then have to go, was there offer? Was there acceptance? Yes, yes, all of those things. So that's one really concrete thing. Use the future fact patterns that your book is going to provide you as a way to integrate and incorporate your understanding of the previous materials. A related thing when it comes to your notes. And this is sort of the process of outlining. This is how your notes from a specific day become your notes from a week, become your notes from two weeks, become your notes from a month, become something that people will call an outline. You're going to hear a lot about outlining. But this is my fundamental take, that, fundamentally, what you want to do is to build your knowledge of the entire course. And the way you do it is you start with a day, and one day combines into two days, and two days combines into three days, and three days combines into a week. And before you know it, ta-da, you have an outline. So one of the ways I would try to do it is I would start-- and I would encourage you sooner rather than later-- don't think about it as an outline. Don't think about that the goal is to create some gigantic document. Think about, how do I combine my notes from the last two days? And if you want to start small, look, use your syllabus. Your syllabus might say, we're going to spend three days on offer and acceptance. OK? Your syllabus might say, we're going to spend three days on contract and offer and acceptance. So once you've spent three days on offer and acceptance, your task that weekend or the next week, let me figure out how I combine my three days of notes on offer and acceptance into one set of notes about offer and acceptance. I will try to summarize all of my notes on offer and acceptance into a single document. Because another thing you're not going to be asked to do on the exam is to say, day 31, what do you remember from day 31? That's not how an exam question is going to be working. Right? And so start combining them. And a couple things I would encourage you to do when you start to do that. One, don't feel bound by the order in which you did them in class. The goal here is to put yourself in a position to do well when you're evaluated on this material. You do not need to be a prisoner to the order in which your instructor chose to do something. George and I were talking before I came up here, and I've now, like, more than a decade later, had an epiphany, I think, a somewhat, to me, counterintuitive, unconventional way my own contracts class was organized. And I, up until this moment, did not understand why it was organized that way. But the point is, just because you did day one, then day two, then day three does not mean your notes that put that material together have to go day one, day two, day three. Maybe you think it makes more sense to start with day three. Maybe you think it makes more sense to go three, two, one. Maybe you think it makes sense to put the material together from the individual days. Because the goal here is for you to learn the material and for you to be able to analyze a problem, not for you to outline the course that your instructor actually taught you. Another thing you need to do is don't feel the need to include everything. It turns out that in the grand scheme of things, not all of this material is super relevant or super important or super germane going forward. Another thing that I want to really encourage you to do when you start putting together the material from a particular topic is to not just focus on the facts and not just focus on the narrow rules, but focus on the themes. This is a sort of big, practical, big picture takeaway piece of advice. Many of us are not all subtle. We are really, really, really not subtle. If you pay attention and you put it all together, you will realize that many classes have two or three big things that your professor talks about all the fricking time. And pay attention for that. Listen for that. Listen. Like, this is a riff that I feel like I have heard before. Or this is a type of a question that people have heard before. You know, one of things that I do when I teach civil procedure is I always ask a sort of big picture theme question at the end on the exam. And I change it every single semester. But one of things I always said and no one has ever come by to disagree with me after the fact and say, this is a question that if you've been paying attention to our class discussion for this entire semester, you should not find this question remotely surprising. Alexander, can you-- yeah, good. These are all questions that we've talked about during the semester, we talked about a lot. And not, like, one day for half an hour. We've talked a lot about them. So when you're outlining the material, when you're outlining the offer and acceptance material, just to continue with that example, pay attention to the big picture themes that were being talked about in that section of the class and include those in your notes. OK. This is another one. Because this is an integrated, iterative process, I really, really, really want to encourage you to ask for help sooner rather than later. Because for me, you're learning and absorbing of this material is a continuous-- or should be, ideally-- a continuous process throughout the semester. That means that if you're stuck, the time to ask for help is sooner rather than later. What you should not be doing-- I'll tell you what you should not be doing, and then we'll talk about what you should be doing. Do not spend the entire semester compiling a list of 50 questions that you will go by your professor's office and ask two days before the exam. That is too late. It is too late to compile a list of 50 questions that you will go by and ask one after another, right? The time to ask-- Now, that doesn't mean you should [INAUDIBLE].. I definitely agree with the sense this is a professional environment. And one of things you need to be doing is thinking about and modeling professional behavior. So there is, in fact, something-- I'll put it this way. Is there such a thing as asking too many questions too often? Yes. Yes, there is. [LAUGHTER] But I will say, as a person, this is sort of your aim for me doing this. Descriptively, the number of people who made that mistake versus number of people who ask too few questions or ask them to, the ratio is so incredibly skewed in this direction it is difficult to comprehend. The overwhelming majority of people that I have taught since I have been here come nowhere close to this problem. And a huge, huge, huge number of people are over on this side of it. Ask questions. Ask them sooner rather than later. I would just say, here is a social contract between you and the professor. Before you ask the question, you should spend some time trying to figure out if you can figure it out yourself. That's just the decent thing to do. Thanks. So I have never actually said-- since I'm not teaching you this fall, I won't say it to many of you. The most frustrating thing that I've never actually said that I would occasionally like to say to someone is that's fascinating because the precise question that you're asking me is answered in the reading, literally. And I don't mean it's implied. I mean literally the answer to that question is contained in the reading. I've never pointed that out to the person. I've usually just smiled and answered the question. But please do make sure before you ask your professor a question that the answer to that question is not contained in the reading. And spend a little time thinking about it because, actually, one of the things that's really useful in terms of having the professional interactions that you're going to want start having is to say, I think this question is difficult. Here's why I think it's difficult. I thought that the answer might be x. But I don't think the answer can be x because the problem with x is y. And so now I'm really not sure. I would love getting those questions. Those questions are thoughtful questions. They're interesting questions. The person has made some effort to figure out what the answer might be, and they're stuck. That's great. That's not only not being a burden or a problem, that's perfect. That's modeling the kind of behavior that you want to do. And you want to answer those questions sooner rather than later. All of us have office hours. One of the things that's most special about this place, I think you're going to find this almost immediately, people are around. And people want to talk to you. And people want to help you. Take advantage of that. Do that and do that and do that. I guess I will say one thing on before I pivot to the very last thing. I have noticed in my own classes, all of you come from very different backgrounds. So I went to a small liberal arts college. The largest class I had in college was substantially smaller than the number of people in this room. I think it was 80 people. I think the next biggest class I had as an undergrad was about 45. And most of them were under 20. And so as a result, I didn't find the idea of talking to professors and asking them questions to be weird because I had spent four years in college doing that. Some of you come from very different academic environments, different academic environments where you are used to have classes with this many people or more people where you're having TAs and where your interactions are with TAs rather than professors. I just want to encourage you, legitimately, seriously, absolutely take advantage of the fact you have three years here where you have the opportunity to ask questions of lots of really interesting people with really interesting backgrounds who really want to help you. But we can't help you if you don't take advantage of it. So please, please, please absolutely do that and do it sooner rather than later. So the takeaways here, and in [INAUDIBLE] class, you'll notice that I always say, takeaways. So these are the three. If you remembered nothing else that I've said over the last 25 minutes, the single most important thing is that no day is an island. I want you to repeat this mantra to yourself throughout the semester. No day is an island. No day is an island. No day is an island. The goal is to, as quickly as possible, start thinking about these things in integrated units. And you want to start practicing integrating that material. And you want to start practicing integrating that material sooner rather than later because integrating and applying the material is not only what you will be asked to do in the exam-- it does, and that's important, of course-- but it's what you'll be asked to do as a lawyer. This is what lawyers will do. No one will come by your office and say, hey, what do you think about Lucy versus Zehmer? It's not going to happen. Someone's going to come into your office and say, hey, I have a case I'm working on. And let me describe it to you. What do you think about it? And what do you think are the hard issues? And what do you think are the interesting issues? And what other facts do you want to know before you tell me what you think the answer to this problem is? That's what lawyers do. That's what you are going to all be training to do, and sooner than you think. And the third is to ask for help and to ask for help sooner. Don't put it off. It's going to be difficult. There are going to be times that are difficult. One of the things I often say to people is the most terrifying words that someone has ever said to me as a 1L is it's going really well. I think I basically understand everything. If you find yourself saying that on the way to law school, that is not a good sign. That is a bad sign. [LAUGHTER] Because a lot of this stuff is really hard. And if you're thinking about it and you're wrestling with it and you're grappling with it, you will find some of it hard. If you don't find it hard, I'm worried that that's because you're not digging into it enough. So don't panic when you find it difficult. I will tell you all, I'm sure I will teach some of you something over law school. I have a terrifying story about how a week before my Civ Pro exam. My two closest friends my first semester of law school, I told them that there was a concept I needed them to explain to me. And when I said I need you to explain it to me, I don't mean I need some specific things explained to me. I need you to start over. [LAUGHTER] Well, in particular, [INAUDIBLE],, which is the class I teach now. It's like a topic that you will spend three weeks on instead of twelve. And I said to these friends, I need you to explain this entire topic to me from the beginning because I don't understand a thing about it. So you're going to do great. [LAUGHTER] I think we're going to answer some questions now, so thanks. [APPLAUSE] INTERVIEWER 1: OK, so we're going to have some time for questions. Does anybody want to ask me a question from the audience? Or should we go out of the question that we've already gotten from people. Your questions? MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: Can you turn the PowerPoint off? INTERVIEWER 1: Yes. TOBY HEYTENS: For those of you who are facing us, there is a blinding light shining directly at us. INTERVIEWER 1: It's fun, isn't it? TOBY HEYTENS: No, it's not. It's like the sun. It's that bright. [LAUGHTER] [INAUDIBLE] INTERVIEWER 1: Also, we have the three students here as well. So you can ask them questions too. They are all second and third year. Well, one's a JD MBA, so he's kind of a second-ish third year-ish. And the other two are third year. So they aren't first years. They actually have been doing this for a little bit. So you can also direct some questions to them. So I'll just go through some of the questions that we have. So I'm trying to read my cases. It's taking me forever. How long should this be taking me to do? MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: Forever. It's just going to take a while at the beginning. I don't think these mics are working, so we're just going to holler. It's just going to take a while. I remember the first few weeks of law school for me, I had to read everything at least three times just to understand what the heck was going on. But it gets faster as you go on. There are these commercial outlines out there. I am not going to recommend that you use them in place of doing your own work. You shouldn't. You need to slog through the material yourself. But if you're reading a case and you feel like I just don't even know what to look at, sometimes that can be a helpful thing to go buy a commercial outline, read their paragraph summary, and then try to read the case and see, OK, now I get what it was I'm supposed to be looking for. I might use a product like that in that way. I would not use it in place of actually reading the cases. I would not use it in place of creating your own briefs and then ultimately creating your own outline for the class. But that can sometimes help speed up the reading process. INTERVIEWER 1: So what do I do when I find a dissenting opinion or a concurring opinion? Do I have to really pay attention to those? GEORGE GEIS: I think those are usually a tip-off that there's a fissure in the case that's worth paying attention to. Many of you probably already know this, but in most classes the case books that you're using are not the full opinions. They're edited opinions. And the editors make choices about how much of the core case to put in and whether or not to include a concurrence or a dissent if there is one. And so the problem with those case books is they're super long. Most editors try to pare it down as much as they can. If there's a concurrence or if there's a dissent in there, it's likely a pretty big tip-off of something interesting worth talking about. Maybe this is a real fissure where the law is at a knife edge and could go either way. And by paying attention, especially to a dissent, you can arm yourself with a good set of counter-arguments that you might want to draw upon if that sort of a topic actually does become a central focus of the discussion. INTERVIEWER 1: I want to add one thing for anybody who has John Jeffries this semester because this happened to me. He reads footnotes. So read the footnotes that are in the cases, too, because they're usually important. And I think most professors do. But sometimes when you're just trying to read to get through the cases, you don't look at the footnotes. But look at the footnotes. They're in there for a reason. MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: That's because he wrote some of those footnotes. [LAUGHTER] INTERVIEWER 1: So when should I start outlining? And the students can answer these questions too. SUBJECT 1: I think it depends. I started outlining around the beginning of November because at that point I had a bigger sense of what the class structure was. It was part of the way to exams that I had enough time to get my outline done. Read over it and print it. SUBJECT 2: There's a fear of outlining too soon. And this is what Professor Hayden was talking about. If you don't have a good sense of the framework of the course, if you don't understand how the pieces fit together, and sometimes it takes 3/4 of the semester to get there, it's not worth it. It's not worth really diving into an outline, of course, because you don't understand all the pieces in the skeleton to try answer your question. So just be [INAUDIBLE]. People will talk about starting outlining in the middle of September. I think that's probably something I would avoid because you don't have a sense of how everything fits together by the middle of September. So wait. I think at the end of October or late November is probably a wise point because you have a good sense of how the course works. ALEXANDER HOFFARTH: Just to add, that law school is really individual. So if saying this person has started to do this already, you should gauge your own understanding, your own needs of what you need to outline and how soon. Try to stay away from, all right, everyone else is doing something. They're not all doing something. Do what is working for you and find the way that you can be successful that matches with what you do. TOBY HEYTENS: So I will say that the one thing that relates to that, for me, is how Alexander put his finger on it. He said, until you get a handle on the course. I think one of the reasons I was probably someone who, by these standards, started outrageously early was because it was the process of trying to assemble a written summary of the course that itself helps me figure out the course. People do different. One of the things I've learned about myself over the years is I have a very hard time thinking abstractly. I have a very hard time thinking outside the context of applying. And so for me, one of the ways that I figure out whether I understand the material is that I try to summarize the material. And then when I try to summarize the material and realize that I don't know how to summarize part of the material, is the tip off-for me that I don't understand part of the material. Or that I don't know how the parts of the material fit together. So one things I will certainly say about that is I would encourage you to view this as a process. Again, you're going to hear this word over and over again. You are not going to turn in this document. This document is not going to get a grade. This document, if you create one-- and I suspect most of you will this semester-- has one and only one objective. It is the instrumental objective of preparing you to do well on an exam. That's it. So there was an instructor a number of years ago who told me if the process has been done correctly, you could be walking into the exam, an alligator could grab it and run away with it and rip it up and throw it down a storm drain. And it doesn't matter because by the moment you're walking into the exam, its work is done. It has no further function to serve. And so I think that's the real way to think about it. So you start outlining too early. You've decided. Some of you will probably do this. And you decide that you've done it all wrong. Then you should rewrite it. Again, it's not a paper. You're not going to turn it in. You're not going to get a grade. The purpose of this is to help you to figure out how to force yourself to work through the material so you get to the point where you understand it, I think. GEORGE GEIS: It's related a little bit, I think, to the way that many professors think about structuring the class. We all make decisions when we're sitting down to plan a course of how are we going to structure this class and how are we going to try to provide students with both the forest perspective and the individual tree perspective. And so what you saw today in our case was an example of an individual tree, looking too closely at something. But many of us try to put a lot of thought into our syllabus and other things where you also have a little bit of a bigger forest picture. And I think just to reiterate what some people have said, until you realize, OK, I can at least start to get glimpses of the forest instead of just looking in at the individual trees, it's not really worth putting a lot of time into the outlining process. But at some point you're going to begin to zoom back a little bit and feel like, OK, I kind of understand how these things are fitting together. And that's probably a pretty good tip-off that it might be worthwhile trying to do some of the things that Professor Hayden talked about with the synthesis and the integration by working towards a little bit of a more condensed outline. But there's lots of different ways to do it. MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: I tended to outline at the end. I really did. Because I always found that if I started to do it too early, I wasn't being choosy. I was just putting everything in. So it wasn't helping me learn it. Whereas if I did it at the end of the semester, it was a way for me to actually memorize what was going on. And I think that was useful. This is not exactly about outlines. But some of you guys will come into class with your laptops. And you will transcribe every word that is being said. And I don't think that's as useful as coming in and taking notes on pen and paper so you're having to pick and choose what you're writing down because the point of creating the outline is to put it through your brain so you can get it. I would say the point of taking notes is the same sort of thing. You're supposed to be thinking about it and grappling with it so you can process it. If instead you're just writing on your laptop, then you're just being a scribe. And you're not actually thinking about it. So I think those are two analogous things. If you're doing your outline too early, you're probably not actually grappling with it. You're just trying to put it all in. And that's not helping you learn it. INTERVIEWER 1: So once you get to an exam, how should you use your outline once you're in the exam? TOBY HEYTENS: You should not. MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: I used to use it as a double check. But no, you're right. For most of my exams, I wasn't really using my outline. I had learned it by creating my outline. So the outline was to the side, and I was answering the questions. But I sometimes flipped through the outline. I made a table of contents for my outline. And so I scanned my table of contents to think is there any issue that I forgot, something that I should have talked about with this fact pattern that I missed. GEORGE GEIS: I was going to say something similar. I usually advise my students once you've got your outline and now you're driving towards the final week or so of preparation for the exam, you might want to think about outlining your outline and just really condensing it down, whether it's a table of contents or whether it's something else. Some of you might have heard about something called an attack sheet or something like that, which I guess is a little bit similar. It's taking your synthesis of the course via the outline and taking it up to another level of synthesis where in a very short, targeted manner you can go down through a series of questions or issues that you might ask yourself. So when you run into a fact pattern, you actually can try to think about let me make sure I'm covering everything. Let me make sure I haven't forgotten something. Oh, wait a second, I forgot that there's this intoxication defense in contract law. Oh, yeah, it looks like there might be a fact on this exam related to that. And so you might want to have a one or two pager that you can use to refer to quickly in the process of thinking about your answer to a test question. But beyond that, I really don't think you're going to have any time to refer to the outline. INTERVIEWER 1: When should I start studying for exams? MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: Oh, gosh. [LAUGHTER] INTERVIEWER: Not Tuesday. [LAUGHTER] TOBY HEYTENS: Well, perhaps I'm a little idiosyncratic on this. I don't really differentiate studying for exams between preparing for class and integrating my material for class. I don't think there's a sharp division between those two things because I think that doesn't really work. So for me, the question is when should I start spending more time? Except you're going to spend-- that's weird. So it's probably the case you'll spend-- look, you're starting law school. You're going to spend outrageous amount of time for the first few weeks. And then you're going to decide that's crazy and unsustainable. And you'll get better, so it'll go down a little bit. And then at some point it starts to go back up again. It's more like the parabola of work or the inverse of that. [LAUGHTER] GEORGE GEIS: Other student perspectives on that? ALEXANDER HOFFARTH: I think it depends on the class. Torts, for example, they require as much studying as just going over everything, creating that outline attack. That will help you a lot. For Civ Pro, it was every day memorizing these statutes for a closed-book multiple choice exam. It kind of depends what you're doing and what the goal is. I guess the average person might start studying after [INAUDIBLE] mid to early November is the answer that students would give. But again, it's individual. It's what you're studying for. It's how well prepared you feel in that class. It's how many notes have in that class. It's multi-factored. GEORGE GEIS: Put it this way. I certainly wouldn't invest a lot of time now in worrying about that. As I think Professor Shadel said, you get in there and you read a case like Lucy. And there's so much stuff going on. And your just trying to figure out what matters and what doesn't matter. And I think that's the task for the first few weeks is just figuring out how to separate the wheat from the chaff. And eventually, you'll start to figure that out much quicker and be able to integrate the things. And then I do think that there's definitely a season when you get a little bit closer to the exam. Because I think you want to put yourself in a position where you've got your outline or your attack sheet or whatever, and then you can use that to just take a lot of practice exams or old exams or actually go through the exercise of doing exactly what you going to have to do on the exam. I think that's a valuable way to study too. So you just want to get yourself in a position to be able to do that. But that can be the last month, the last three weeks. I mean there's no one magic frame when all of a sudden you need to shift over. But you certainly don't have to worry about it now. MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: Right now you're keeping up with the reading. That's your job. You're going to make sure you get your reading done. You're going to practice briefing your cases. And by the time you get to November, maybe that's what you're thinking about. GEORGE GEIS: We have a question up here. AUDIENCE: My question is, is there anything, any advice that you now know, now, that if you were in our shoes that you would wish you had known then? MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: Yeah, I wish that I had known about how to manage stress. So I did a lot of just putting my head down and just working with just reading and trying to keep up. And eventually, I learned that I was better able to think if I also made sure to exercise every day, if I made sure to sleep and eat and things like that. So I don't think I knew anything about that when I started law school. And so first year law school I would get sick all the time. And I couldn't sleep. And I'd feel anxious. By the third year of law school, I was paying a lot more attention to things like I have got to go to the gym. I have got to take a deep breath. And I've got to go out with my friends sometimes. And so I think that would be my advice. Think about that. GEORGE GEIS: I think that you're at an interesting time in your career. I agree with what Professor Shadel said. I think that there's lots of opportunities to do all kinds of things here. And you can live a wonderful balanced life on top of the class. I think it's worth hitting it a little harder this semester than you sometimes might have in the past. We're all coming from different circumstances, but it's worth investing some effort. We're all here for a reason. And I think really good things can happen if you do really well early on. I think this is the type of place where there's going to be great opportunities for everybody. And so it's not worth stressing about all the time. But I think that to reiterate another theme that's come up, there's no one way for anybody to attack this. Just to talk about what I did, I had worked for a couple of years before going to law school. And so for me, it was nice to be able to come back into an environment where I had more control over my own schedule. I worked pretty diligently. But I also didn't go crazy. I'd go in and I'd I take notes in my class. And I'd try to prepare as much as I could. And then at the end of the day, I'd go to my computer. And I would actually type up a synthesis of what the notes were, along the lines of what Professor Heytens was suggesting. And then at some point 2/3 of the way through the semester, I began to think about how do I take those typewritten notes and then work it into something that's a little more structured. But there are lots of other ways that people did it. And to again rephrase something the students said, I don't think it's worth getting that hung up on what everybody else is doing because what works for them might be perfectly sound for them. But it may not be the right way for you to tackle things. TOBY HEYTENS: I would pay attention-- this is something, at least, I had not thought of enough before I started here. I hadn't worked for a few years. I went straight through. I think it wasn't until probably 2L or 3L that I really paid attention to when specifically, when during the day, I was able to productively work. This is mentally taxing stuff you're going to be doing. This is mentally taxing reading. And it's mentally taxing thinking. And again, in some sense the only objective is to learn the material as well as you can in the short term, instrumentally, so you can do well in exams. And in the long term so that you can actually know the material for your future lives as lawyers. And something I don't think I learned until my 2L or 3L year, if I really want to tackle difficult material what I need to do is I need to get up first thing in the morning. And I need to start working immediately. And I mean immediately. Don't shower. Don't get dressed. Go to your desk, start reading because I'm a world class procrastinator. And I will, if I let myself do anything other than get up and start reading, I will find a way to waste two hours of time. And the reason that that's bad is I've actually learned that my most mentally productive time of the day is about the first three and one half hours after I wake up. If I need to get done good hard thinking, learning, it is the first three and a half hours when I wake up. I then have to take a break for about two hours because I'm mentally worthless between noon and 2:00. I just can't mentally do anything between noon and 2:00. And then I have a period of three or four hours where I can think again well until like 5:00 or 6:00. It's not that I don't do any work outside those times. But one of the things I've learned about myself, and I would encourage you to pay attention to about yourself, my best thinking and my best learning happens between about 8:00 in the morning and about 11:00 in the morning. And it happens between 2:00 and 5:00 PM. And so if I'm needing to learn a lot of materials, I need to wall off those times. And I need to use those times to be thinking and learning. And again, you should find out that if I'm going to have lunch with a friend, if I'm going to go to the gym, I should go between noon and 2:00 because I am not going to get any useful thinking done between noon and 2:00. So I might as well not stare at my computer not learning anything. I should do all the other things that I want to do with my life. I should then take a break between 6:00 and 8:00 because I'm not going to learn anything between 6:00 and 8:00. And then I can work for a few hours between 8:00 and 11:00 if I have a really busy day. But I think paying attention to that about yourself and not fighting that about yourself because the objective is to learn. And you can't learn without paying attention to how you learn the best and when you learn the best. MOLLY BISHOP SHADEL: I think I want to emphasize something that George alluded to, which is that your first year ends up being significant. It's kind of a stupid system, really. But after your first year of law school, you get these two semesters of grades, and then you do on grounds interviews. You guys may have seen some of the students walking around in their suits. So they're interviewing for their jobs that will happen after the second year of law school. And that ends up being this really important summer job that could maybe turn into your permanent job. And you're doing those interviews based on two semesters of grades, just your first year. It doesn't mean if your first year doesn't go well, that it's the end of the world. It really doesn't. People can turn this around. But it does mean that if you are ever going to pay attention to your grades, it's the first year that ends up being important. And so I would be thinking about-- I can remember signing up for activities my first year that were really time consuming. And that was a mistake. It's better to sign up for activities that are fun and that are going to connect you with people that you like. But I was doing the court appointed special advocate kind of stuff, which was an enormous time commitment. And it was not appropriate for a 1L. It would be better for somebody who is later in their career where it's not as significant. So I would say prioritizing studying for this first year will pay off for you in a significant way. If it doesn't, if your grades aren't what you want them to be, the world is not over. It is possible to turn it around. Many, many people do. But I would say first year, pay attention to it.