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I think that the course content in the first week of law school, particularly in your first year of law school, doesn't really matter. Let's talk about it.

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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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Okay, I so I just started off this podcast episode with a really hot take that the first year of law school and the first week of law school in particular don't really matter, and that law students shouldn't really be too concerned about what's happening in class that week. That's a pretty controversial opinion. So let me explain what I mean. I am not saying that you should not attend the first week of law school or totally zone out or play on your phone the whole time. Nothing like that. That is not what I'm getting at. But what I want to do in this podcast episode is put that first week of law school in perspective and think about why the first week of law school is important for your exam preparation and why it is not. And the reason I'm doing this podcast episode is because a lot of law students really stress out about that first week of law school. I mean, hey, it's your first day of school. You've probably been stressing about that since kindergarten, and the feeling hasn't entirely gone away. So you're in an unfamiliar environment, learning in a new way. You're reading these cases and court decisions for the first time. You're learning about esoteric legal topics that you don't really have familiarity with. It can all be a little bit overwhelming. But the cases that you read in the first week of law school in particular may not necessarily matter as much as you think. Let me give you an example. One class that you are going to take in law school is civil procedure, which is a class, as I'll do another podcast episode about, about how civil cases against individual private parties proceed in federal court and the rules that apply to those cases as they move their way towards trial. So the steps that the parties go through essentially to get their case towards a trial, or potentially to ask to have the case dismissed before a trial. So civil procedure is all about that, that process, that procedure, right? One of the first cases that civil procedure professors in textbooks often have students read at the very beginning of civil procedure is a case called Panoyer v. Neff. Panoyer v. Neff is a case just about every law student has read. Panoyer v. Neff was decided by the United Supreme Court when exactly? Way back in 1878. So it is not a recent case by any stretch of the imagination. And Panoyer v Neff is a super important case. In that case, the Supreme Court was deciding when a state court, so like a court in Minnesota, can exercise personal jurisdiction over a party out of that state, like an individual who lives in Massachusetts. So it's a really important concept for fairness that arises under the 14th Amendment, which had just been enacted not long before 1878. So you got this new constitutional amendment, and the Supreme Court is saying, hey, under this new amendment, we think that there are limits to a state court's right to allow people and corporations from other states to be sued domestically. So all they're saying in the Supreme Court in Panoyar Vinef is: hey, like if you're in Minnesota and you want to sue someone who lives in Massachusetts, well, we're going to place some limitations on that because we think it would be unfair and unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, in certain circumstances, for you sitting in Minnesota to file a lawsuit in state court and require that person all the way over in Massachusetts to defend that lawsuit in Minnesota. I mean, think back in 1878. That would have been getting in your covered wagon and traveling from Massachusetts to Minnesota. If that's in the winter, that's not going to be a fun trip and defending that case. So what the court was saying is under the Due Process Clause, there are some limits to your ability to make someone travel all across this country to be a defendant. So the court is establishing that principle. And it's a really, to be candid with you, tough opinion to read, especially in your first week of law school. It uses the kind of language that people used in 1878. It's got difficult descriptions to read about what the facts of the case were, about the jurisprudence, about the law. And so it's your first week of law school. You are opening up your first case to read in your case book, and you get to Panoy or V Nef, and you are like, what is going on here? What is this about? What is this personal jurisdiction stuff about? No one's explained this to me. What is the 14th Amendment and how does that have to do with civil procedure? I thought that was about the rules for how a case proceeds. I thought we were going to be reading the civil rules of civil procedure. Oh my goodness, this is confusing. And so it's easy in reading a case like Panoy or Vinev to get super overwhelmed. And many other law school classes start this way. They will start with a really big foundational case, often from long ago, to help you understand some of the philosophy behind how the law got to where it is today. It is important for you as lawyers to understand the history of certain legal doctrines that could come up in your practice. But also, remember, law school isn't teaching you particular areas of law so that you can be the world's foremost expert at them. You are not going to be a civil procedure expert after taking civil procedure. Law school is teaching you how to think like a lawyer. And no matter what area of law you are in, whether you're doing ERISA benefits law or civil litigation or tax law or something else, if you want to understand what the law is today and truly be an expert in that field, you are going to have to turn back time and read those older cases to understand how the law got to where it is today over the 250 plus years that this nation and its court systems have been around. Because if you don't understand how the courts got there, you may take positions that are inconsistent with the journey that the law has been on. You may make an argument about the law, and your counterparty says, wait a minute, that whole point that this person was raising was invalidated like decades ago. I had a real brief that I wrote not too long ago where I wrote something like that. A party had cited something actually related to civil procedure in the state where I was practicing. And the case site was like from the 1950s. And I was like, huh, this is a this is a principle I haven't seen before. And so I fired up Westlaw and I searched for that principle. And I saw in the whole state's history, it had only been cited like 13 times and most recently in the 1960s. And then the courts started using different language. The principle never really needed to be overruled. It just wasn't one that really was a hard and fast rule. And so I called out the other party pretty explicitly to say, hey, they're hearkening back to this old law that no court has relied on in the last 50 years. So, judge, you shouldn't rely on that principle either. Otherwise, you're going to be going down a path that no one is on anymore in these court decisions. So you're going to be learning about these old cases so that you have a foundation to learn about the newer stuff, the newer and current rules. Because here's the thing about Panoyer V Nef. It isn't the key case anymore when it comes to knowing the rules for personal jurisdiction as we litigate them today. It's not. It is old news. Is it still good law? Sure. It still stands for the basic principle of personal jurisdiction under the 14th Amendment. It still explains why we have that principle, why it promotes due process, why it's consistent with the 14th Amendment, and why it is important. It stands for all of that. And you should understand that. And then as you progress through the class in the next few weeks, you're going to read way more recent cases about personal jurisdiction, cases like worldwide Volkswagen, cases like Calder, many others, Burger King. There are many other cases, way more recent. Believe it or not, the Burger King case and the Volkswagen case were not decided in 1878. And there are even more recent ones than those. As you read those more recent cases, you're going to learn more and more about what the law is today, how personal jurisdiction has developed over time. Those cases, for purposes of succeeding in law school, I would suggest to you are more important than the really old ones like Panoy or V Nef when it comes to writing really solid exam answers and drafting an impeccable outline for your exam. They are more important. The more recent ones, usually not the ones that you're learning in your first week of law school, that are just intended to introduce you to a legal topic. Those older cases are important, so I don't want you to ignore them. In some cases, older cases are the only ones you will read to understand the common law. I'm not saying you should ignore them. Let me be clear. What I'm saying is that in your first week of law school, if you are reading cases simply so the professor can help you understand the philosophy behind torts or the philosophy behind civil procedure and topics like personal jurisdiction. Well, guess what? Your law school exam at the end of the semester is not a philosophy discussion. On your issue spotter exam at the end of the semester for your 1-L courses, you're going to be presented with a long hypothetical fact pattern, and you'll be asked one question: discuss the legal rights and obligations of the parties. That's not a philosophical question. That's identifying what claims and defenses parties have and how strong those claims and defenses are based on the arguments that you would expect both parties to raise. And so that's something to consider. That those early cases may not be as useful for writing exam answers. When you go into your civil procedure exam, you probably aren't going to talk about Panoyer V Nef specifically at all. Even if you want to get in A, you probably don't need to mention it. I could be wrong, so be careful based on what your professor is looking for. But more likely, what you're going to do on your exam if you see a personal jurisdiction issue is you're going to say, oh, okay, I see, professor, that there is an issue with personal jurisdiction. There is an issue over whether this Minnesota state court can exercise personal jurisdiction over this defendant in Massachusetts in the lawsuit filed in that state court by let's call him Bob in Bob's lawsuit against James in Massachusetts, let's say. The issue is whether the state court can exercise personal jurisdiction over James in Massachusetts in Bob's lawsuit in Minnesota. Okay, you've said the issue. What's the next part of IRAC? The next step of IRAC is stating the rule. And so you're going to say the rule is that a state court has personal jurisdiction over a defendant when, and then you're going to pull out the rules that are most applicable to the facts in the problem, the rules that are implicated by the problem. You will have written those rule statements in advance in your outline if you have prepared well. That's my suggestion to you. You will have bullet points, and each bullet point will probably represent one rule that you got from one case. So in the Volkswagen case, this is the rule. In the Burger King case, this is the rule. You don't need to necessarily reference the cases. And in some cases, you may represent an actual rule, like a rule of civil procedure. Like the rule under Rule 56 for summary judgment motions is that a moving party is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law when there is no genuine dispute as to an issue of material fact. Okay, that's getting a bit complicated, but you get the idea that your outline is going to have the issue statement and the rule statement. And that's what you're going to write in your exam answer. The rule statements that you are most likely to use are probably from the more recent cases. It is probably not extremely likely that you are going to rely on rule statements from really old cases that your professor was simply using to introduce you to the subject matter of the class, or really old cases that have been way further developed by the law as time went on. It's unlikely. Now, maybe the fact pattern presents you with in the problem, presents you with like the same fact pattern from an old case. Maybe that happens and you say, hey, this is similar to this old case, and this is old law. Maybe you recognize that, but I highly doubt it. What's more likely to happen is that the rule statements that you write in your outline will come from the new cases because those are ones that have developed the case law the most. What's more likely to happen is that the rule statements that you write in your outline don't come from those philosophical cases that you read at the beginning that are just intended to introduce the subject matter. One other reason that those cases at the very beginning may not matter as much is because they may not actually fit under any specific issue that you are discussing in the class and that may be tested. Here's what I mean. Every class has a finite number of issues that they are teaching you about and could come up on an exam. So in civil procedure, there are only a few different issues that could come up and that you learn about. It could be issues related to personal jurisdiction or related to subject matter jurisdiction or related to what law applies, the eerie doctrine, or when summary judgment is appropriate, or when a motion to dismiss is appropriate. Let's say those are the issues you learn about most, and you learn about the legal issues that come up when those issues are being battled. There are also a finite number of issues in your contracts and torts classes. For example, in contracts, you're only going to learn about a finite number of legal disputes that parties can have against each other. You're going to learn about when a contract was formed and how parties dispute that, when a contract was breached and how parties dispute that, and what the damages are and how parties dispute that. There are a few more, but again, it's a finite number. Those cases that you read in your first week of class, you should be trying to discern and determine what issue, if any, does this case fall under? And how important is the rule from that case to determining the answer to that issue when it's disputed in practice? How important is the case to that principle? I'll tell you, I've briefed personal jurisdiction multiple times in my career. And I've fought that issue in real cases in state and federal courts. I don't think I've ever once relied heavily on Panoyer v. Neff because it's just a doctrinal case to me, establishing the general principle. It's a waste of time for me to talk to a judge about Panoyer V Nef, because I want to talk to the judge about the much more recent cases that more clearly lay out what the current rules are as currently articulated by other modern judges. So look on your outline in that first week. By outline, I actually mean your syllabus. Look at your course syllabus, the outline that the professor drafted of the issues in the course. If the professor has headings in that syllabus, those headings might indicate the issues that are going to come up in the course and that you are going to be tested on. It may give you a roadmap of what the issues are that you need to know for the exam. Like your contract syllabus might say, hey, this week we're learning about contractual offers, this week we're learning about acceptance, and here are the cases you read under acceptance, and here are the cases you read under offers. This week we're learning about consideration. That's the topic. If you look at the syllabus and that first week has cases on it that don't fall under those issues, it may be because when your professor is reading your exam answers, they don't really expect you to be talking about that case or its rules in detail in your exam answer that you write. It could be that those cases are simply an introduction to contracts, an introduction to civil procedure. Now, I've said that some classes have really old cases that they'll have you read by Panoy or V Nef to introduce you to the doctrine generally, to introduce you to philosophy behind the class that you are taking. But it is also possible that the professor will go in the other direction and have you read a new case, maybe one that isn't even in the case book, but is very interesting and is on the topics that you will be learning about in the class and might touch on numerous issues that you're going to be learning about in the class. So that's a new case. And again, you've got to ask yourself okay, is the professor presenting this case so that I can just learn kind of the philosophy behind this area of law? Or does this actually drop rules that I need to put in my outline under particular issues that are coming up? Which way is it going? It's hard to know, but try to figure that out. And one of the reasons I'm telling you not to stress as much is because what I care about is you succeeding on the exam. And if you are reading course content that's philosophical or simply to introduce you to the topics you're learning about in class, it may simply not be as important for your exam answer. It just may not have rules that you're going to put in your outline and that you're going to drop into that exam answer to have something impeccably well written for your professor to read and to prepare that in advance as much as possible. It just may not be useful for that when you've got more recent cases or ones that are more specific to the issues that could actually come up on an exam. So think about that. Think about the importance of it. The other reason I'm doing this podcast episode and telling you don't necessarily stress about those cases is because they are only a small part of the class. But because you are new to law school, you may put too much weight on trying to learn them. You are going to want to probably work hard as you enter law school. A lot of law students, like you, are really hardworking students. And so you're new, you want to do your best, you want to start strong. So you open up page one of that case book and you are reading every line and taking case briefs on every single word. You're working diligently because that's what you've always done to succeed. And you feel like you're spinning your wheels. You don't understand anything about the case. You are pulling your hair out. You're wondering, oh my gosh, did I make a wrong decision to go to law school? Am I ever going to understand this? Is this real life? Is this forever? What is going on? And you are stressing out about it. That stress may not be worth it. You may be putting work into trying to understand cases when it doesn't. Doesn't really matter for success on the exam. That's what we care about in law school to perform your best, not whether you understand everything about philosophical cases or introductory cases that simply aren't important for the exam answer that you will write for your professor. So my tip for you is read those cases, maybe brief them a little bit, do your best to understand them, maybe read some supplements on them to get a better understanding of the context that they fit in, especially if you're having trouble understanding the cases, but then move on. Move on to cases that actually fit squarely under the issues in the class so that you can learn what rules apply under those issues, so that you can write issue statements and rule statements in advance and then be ready to deploy lawyer-like analysis when you pull those issues and rules from your outline and drop them quickly into your exam in an impeccably well-written way. That's what we want to focus on, not necessarily being the law student in your class who understands the philosophy behind Panoyer v Nef better than every single one of your peers. That is not a way to win at law school. So think about the bigger picture. The other tip that I have is that if you're reading those first cases and you just aren't getting it, move on, but plan to come back to it later and casually in a stress-fee, low pressure way. So move on. Read other cases, figure out how they work into your outline. And once you finish that section of the book, go back to the first cases that you had trouble with and ask yourself, what did I miss here? What did I not appreciate at that time? And how should I develop my outline based on these? Where should I put these in my outline? If, as I'm reading cases like Panoyer VNF, I don't think the rules are going to be very important. If they fit under any issue at all, I'd put those rules pretty far down in the list of bullet points. You want to organize your list of rules in order of importance and write them in the order that you think you would pluck them out and drop them into your exam answer. So one like Panoyer V Nef wouldn't be at the top of the page, even though it's the first case that you read. Why? Because again, it's not the first rule you're going to pull out. It's not the best articulation of the rule or the most recent one. It's just an early philosophical case. So if you write anything about those cases in your outline, put it down further. Put it down further in the bullet points. Put other more recent, more relevant, more useful, and better articulated current rules towards the top so that when you see those rules implicated by an issue, you can deploy your pre-written issue statement from your outline. You can deploy your pre-written rule statements from your outline and then move on. So that is how I think you should approach your first week of law school or those early cases that you read. Again, I'm not saying they aren't important. I'm not saying skip them. I'm not saying that they couldn't be useful to you even in your exam answer. But what I do want you to do is keep them in perspective because you're likely to give them undue weight because you've got the time when you're new in law school to do that. And you want to do your best. And so you're going to focus on them. And you might focus on them a bit too much and at the expense of other cases that you really should be spending a bit more time trying to understand so you can put them properly and effectively into your outline. So do not your lack of understanding of those early cases prevent you from moving forward in a productive way with the other ones that you are looking at throughout the semester. Don't get hung up. Go back if you need to. I hope this was helpful and puts that first week of law school in a bit better perspective because it can be stressful when you're reading these cases and don't necessarily understand them. But again, they're just one of many cases that you're going to read in preparing for the exam. And they probably are not the most important ones when it comes to writing down rule statements for your exam. So thank you so much for joining everyone. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I hope it sets you at ease about your first week of law school in those early difficult cases. We will see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 26:36

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.