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Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of Law School Decoded about Law School Supplement. Let's get started.

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Welcome to Law School Decoded, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on what it's really like to succeed in law school. Let's get started.

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All right, everybody. On this episode, we are talking about law school supplements. And the title of this episode is The Danger of Law School Supplements. So we're going to talk about why using supplements could benefit you in law school and why lots of law students do use them. But we're also going to talk about why supplements can be dangerous for your final exam performance. So we'll dig into why that is and why supplements might lead you down a road that you do not want to go down in the preparation for your exams. But let's start with a simple question. What are law school supplements? Well, the answer is really simple. Law school supplements are books and similar resources like websites, or I'll even lump AI into the definition of a supplement that provide law students with kind of a hornbook explanation of what the law of a particular area is. So in law school, you're going to learn different subjects by reading a case law textbook related to that subject. And when you pop open a case law textbook, as the title suggests, it's got a bunch of different cases in there. And you're going to read the facts and the holdings of those cases. And through that process, you're going to distill legal rules that you will use on the law exam to apply to different factual scenarios that your professor presents you with on the exam. And so that is what your professor will assign you. Law school casebooks can be hard to digest. You're jumping into a case that could be 10 pages or more. You're trying to figure out what is important about this as I learn the law. What is the rule from this case? What is the holding? What is the procedural posture? What are the underlying facts, which can sometimes be confusing in the case excerpts that you're given? So because case law textbooks can make it difficult to just learn the simple question of what the law is, many law students will turn to supplements. And supplements do a better job and simpler job of just outlining what the law of a particular area is. It will summarize contract law, property law, criminal procedure. It will organize those topics the same way that your case book does, but instead of making you read factual scenarios and trying to figure out what the rule is that you're supposed to take from those, it's just going to tell you this is the legal rule as we articulate it in this supplement. And so law students use supplements because case law can be really hard to read. It can be hard to read three or four cases a night for your class and then come in the next day and really understand what the outline of the rules are, especially because those cases are jumping you right into a really granular legal rule. Whereas a supplement can help you zoom out and learn about a particular area of law in a more succinct, more easily summarized manner. So supplements sound great, don't they? And because law students are hardworking, they use supplements as a supplement to what they are learning in the classroom. Because they're going to work hard. They're going to want to digest all the material that they can to be an expert in contract law, in property and civil procedure. And that's going to help them succeed on exams, right? Not necessarily. The answer to that, surprisingly, is not necessarily. Because remember, what your exam is doing is not necessarily testing you on everything out there related to contract law or civil procedure or property law. Instead, the professor who wrote the exam is usually testing the topics that were presented in class. And in contracts class or torts, you're not going to learn every single subject related to that topic. You're not going to learn the entire universe of tort law, every single tort, every single defense, every single element, every single aspect of what torts is. That's a really big hornbook, would explain that, right? A really big supplement. You're not going to learn all that. You're going to be learning specific granular rules and specific granular topics through specific cases taught by your professor. And then the professor is going to use exactly those materials to build the law school exam. The exam in almost all cases is going to be based on the assignments and the cases and the rules that the professor gives you and that you learn from the case book readings. And so now let's think about what it takes to succeed on the exam. It takes understanding those cases and rules really, really well. Understanding how your professor is going to play around with facts on the exam to implicate those rules and to get you writing exam answers that leverage those legal rules. The danger of supplements, or at least one of them, is that when you pick up a supplement and you start reading, it seems nice because it's a really simple, straightforward, easy explanation of the law, exactly what you aren't getting when you read the case book and have to slug through those facts and the holdings and the rules. However, in reading those supplements, you are studying material that will inevitably fall outside of the exam universe and of the class universe to some extent. You will be studying something that isn't what your professor assigned. You will be studying something that your professor is not necessarily using to craft the final exam, which is going to be based mostly on those case readings. So what's the danger here? Well, when you're trying to figure out the whole world of torts, now in reading those supplements, you're going to be learning some rules that your professor is not teaching in the class. You are going to be learning some nuances to the law that your professor is not teaching in the class. And you're going to hear and read articulations of those rules and those torts and those defenses that your professor has not taught in the case book. And so if you rely on those rules, when you write your exam answer, you may be writing an articulation of a rule or writing a new rule that your professor does not intend for you to use on the exam and is not intending to give you any points for. You might be legally right, it might be applicable to the situation, but you are going down the wrong path and relying on the wrong thing to answer the question. So a risk is that by studying material outside of the course universe, you bring into your exam answer material that should not be there. And you may forget what did I learn from case law versus what did I learn from a supplement? And in reading your exam answer, say you rely on something from a supplement that your professor doesn't think was in your case book assignments and that your professor didn't intend to test you on, the professor's not going to think you're clever for finding some different arcane, untested rule. No, the professor's gonna say, well, this is extraneous. This isn't what I taught in the course. I am not gonna give any points for this because this answer isn't what I was going for when I wrote this exam. Remember, my thesis throughout many of these podcast episodes is that as much as you can, everything that you do during a law school semester should be aimed at maximizing your performance on the exam. You should be practicing the exam, you should be outlining in a way that literally writes your exam answer as much as possible before you walk into the room. And reading a supplement doesn't necessarily help with that. If you built your exam outline based on supplemental material, that very well could include material that isn't supposed to show up in the exam answer from your professor's perspective. So should you use supplements? Here's my take. They can be extremely helpful to assist you with learning the basics of the law so that you can better understand the cases that you're reading, and so you can better build an exam answer outline based on those cases. But you should not read supplements to extract rule statements that you'll use on your exam or necessarily to directly build your outline. If you do that, you're probably going down a road that is disconnected from the one your professor took to writing the exam and that your professor expects you to walk in preparing your exam answer. So just use supplements to help better understand the universe of torts, contracts, and property. Supplements will help you zoom out and see the bigger picture and understand the areas of law that you are learning. But when it comes time to really prep an outline and to prep an exam answer, you should read the cases and you should extract the legal rules and elements and defenses from those cases. You should build the sections of your outline based on the sections of the textbook and case book that you have read, not based on a supplement. Another thing that supplements can be helpful for is that many of them will have, for example, the examples and explanation series will have practice problems. You should think about how practice problems will be answered on your exam, because that will help you practice and get better at writing exam answers. So the bottom line is this supplements can be helpful to giving you confidence that you understand an area of law. They can help your ability to see the bigger picture in the areas of law that you are learning, particularly in your first year. So they can be helpful, they can be useful, but don't over-rely on them. Supplements are not a substitute for understanding the case law in your classes. Supplements are not a substitute for building a robust exam answer outline based on the actual sections of the textbook that you have been assigned in the cases that you have read. What supplements tell you about legal rules aren't necessarily how you should articulate them on the exam, because your case law book will articulate them a little bit different. And we want to use the actual assignments in the class to build that exam outline and that exam answer. Now, one exception might be if your professor tells you that a supplement is required or helpful for the class. In that instance, you might rely on the supplement a little bit more, particularly if it is extremely contiguous with the content in the exam textbook. But other than that, beware of supplements. They can be very helpful to helping you see the bigger picture. But if you rely on them too much and in the wrong ways, you might write an exam answer that is not well tailored to your class and not optimized to help you perform at your maximum level. Instead, it'll take you down a wrong path. You'll rely on information that you shouldn't. You'll add information to the exam outline that you shouldn't in ways and in places where it shouldn't go. And ultimately you're going to be distracted. So keep supplements in mind as a potential resource. Also, if you're going to buy supplements, you can probably definitely buy them used if you can get them cheaper. They're probably not changing that much from year to year. And for the purpose that you're using them for, buying a new one probably isn't necessary. So those are my tips regarding the dangers of law school supplemental materials from books to online resources to even using AI to understand areas of the law better. I hope that's helpful and helps you maximize your performance on your law school exams. Hope you enjoyed this podcast, and we will see you next time.

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That's it for today's episode of Law School Decoded. Visit us online at lawschooldecoded.com and make sure to subscribe. Until next time, keep decoding the law one step at a time.