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In this episode, let's talk about why you as a law student can zone out in your law school classes. 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, so I used a hook for this episode in the title and in that intro to draw your in. I said you can zone out in your law school classes and you can zone out and still be super successful in law school. That's my thesis for this one. But it's a little bit more complicated than that. I am not actually saying that you should fall asleep in law school class, cross your arms, take a nap, play on your phone the whole time, not pay any attention. Here is what I mean. In your law school class, what is going to happen? You are going to read some cases going into that day. Those cases are usually related to one or two legal issues that will be tested on your law school exam. Your professor is going to call on students to explain the facts and the holdings of those cases. And then the professor is going to say, okay, well, what kind of arguments would the plaintiff or defendant have if I changed the facts a little bit? If the facts of the case were a little bit different, who would have a stronger case? Or what would make this party or that party's case a little bit stronger? That's the Socratic method. It's designed to get you to learn how to look for facts that would be applicable to legal rules so that you can use those facts or the absence of facts to advocate for a client in real life. It's the way that we have tested law students for generations because it helps people be better lawyers. This is literally what we do. A lot of people knock the Socratic method, say, ah, it doesn't matter. Someone who's practiced law a pretty long time now, I can tell you I'm using facts to establish a case for my client. I'm using the lack of certain facts to make a better case for my client every single day. And so you really do kind of use this to be a better advocate for whoever you decide to represent in your legal practice. But here's the thing: when your professor is asking students to identify the issue in a case or the rule in a case and to analyze it with them using the Socratic method, they are asking someone, just like you, who has no experience in the law, to opine on it. And very often, even if students know the cases very well, even if they know the rules very well, they aren't necessarily presenting their understanding of the case in the most robust and clear way and the answers that they are giving when they are being peppered on the spot about the case. They're often just as confused as everyone else in that class about what is going on. And so your goal in law school is to write the best exam answer that you are capable of writing based on your intellect, based on what you learn, based on your study habits. You want to be the best that you can be. And to do that, you need to know what are the issues that are going to be tested on the exam, what are the rules that you're going to use to decide those issues and that govern those issues. And then what are facts that you identify in the problem? And how can you write about those facts on the exam that will advocate for both parties and for the parties that you read about in the exam problem? If that's your objective in law school, to write an exam like that, what students are saying in class is only probably of marginal importance. Because students don't necessarily set what the rules are from cases, you get those by reading the cases. Students don't necessarily set what the issues are in cases, you get those by looking at what section of the case book you're reading at that time. If you're in torts reading the battery section, you're probably learning about issues that come up with battery. If you're in torts and you're reading about consent as a defense, you're learning about whether consent might be a defense to an intentional or other tort. So the textbook is going to teach you what the issues and the rules are. So what students are saying isn't necessarily going to be very well presented, isn't going to be polished, isn't going to be prepared, it isn't going to be nearly as well stated as what you are reading in your case book. The casebook will help you formulate the issue statements that you can write into your outline, that you can write as issue statements and as rule statements. The case book, table of contents, will help you decide what the issues are going to be on your exam. None of that is stuff you learn in class by listening. And here's the reason I make the controversial statement that you can zone out in class, which I don't mean literally. What I mean is that some of the content in class, particularly from your very smart peers, isn't going to be the most important thing for building your outline and writing an impeccable exam answer. So if you are furrowing your brow, trying to listen as hard as possible and to understand as best you can, and you're frustrated in class, you're like, I'm not getting anything out of this discussion. I don't understand any of this. Either my peers are way smarter than me, or they just don't get it because I'm not following what they're talking about. You're not alone. And it's not necessarily a bad conclusion when you are talking about succeeding on the exam. That Socratic method isn't necessarily going to help you build an impeccable outline. Now, the professor will ask questions that could help you hone your outline. So let's say before class you read a personal jurisdiction case. I just did a podcast on International Shoe Company v. Washington's. It's a civil procedure case about personal jurisdiction. Let's say you read that, and so you learn that this case has all kinds of rules about the 14th Amendment and whether a state can exercise personal jurisdiction over a defendant. So you, before class, started writing an outline. You wrote a header, you wrote an issue statement, you wrote some of the rule statements that you get from Air National Shoe. You know you're going to understand them better as you read more cases. You might delete some of those rules because they're old and you don't need them. You might hone them a bit. You might decide to use the phrasing from other cases that are a bit more modern and more recent. But in any event, you've started drafting that outline. So you go to class with a little case brief, a little half pager describing the facts of International Shoe and the rule and the holding. And then you've got this outline already written, this outline of what your exam answer is going to be months down the road. You go to class with that. As you're listening to the professor ask questions of students, listen to the way that the professor is playing around with the facts of a case like International Shoe. The professor might be saying things like, well, you know, the court in International Shoe held that the state of Washington could exercise personal jurisdiction over International Shoe because they had 11 to 13 employees in the state. And so that was adequate contact for the court to say you had continuous and systematic contact there. But what if it was only two employees? What if it was one employee? What if it was no employees, but International Shoe occasionally sent salespeople from its headquarters in Missouri into the state? They traveled from Missouri. And what if those salespeople spent three months there? What about one month? What about one day? What kind of arguments is International Shoe going to raise to try to say we don't have jurisdiction there? Listen to the questions that the professor is asking, right? Because that's what's going to give you a better understanding of the kind of facts the professor may be thinking about dropping into that exam prompt that you need to look out for and be ready to analyze, to be ready to use for your client's benefit and the arguments that you make on the exam. So look for those questions, not necessarily how your peers answer them. Of course, if your peers give an answer about, say, a party's contacts and the professor's like, yes, you got it, take note of that. But also, if you see the professor struggling to get a student on the same page, it might be that the content that you're getting from your peers isn't necessarily what the professor is looking for and what's going to be important for the exam. But listen and hone in on the professor's questions. Confirm as you're listening there in class what you've already written in your outline. Confirm that you understood what the issue is correctly, so that you know what kind of issue to look for in the exam. Confirm your understanding of the rule statement. The professor will probably re-say the rule or ask someone to say it, and the professor will say, yes, that's the rule from this case. And then you can look at your outline and say, okay, great, I got that. Now you may not change the wording of the outline much based on even what the professor is saying in class, because the language from your case book is going to be more precise probably than what the professor can recite. If the professor displays the rule in a PowerPoint or on a chalkboard, old-fashioned way, you might write that down. You might say, ah, this is how my professor phrases the international shoe rule. So that's how I should be dropping it into my outline. That's how I should be copy-pasting that outline into my exam answer when that comes up. You may adjust. You may hone your outline. You may make it better. You've already written it. So now you're improving. You're getting it to a more mature state as time goes on. That's why you outline early, is so you can get better at it. When I was writing briefs in court, I used to write briefs as early as I could before the deadline because I'd look at them three days before and I'd say, oh, I could have written that better. With time, I could get better. Usually the first thing I wrote wasn't exactly what I wanted to submit to the court if my work product was going to be exceptional. So that's how you should listen in class. That's what you should listen for in class, but I'll still stand by it that you can kind of zone out on some of the things that are happening in class and still do impeccably well in law school. You can still be at the top of your class. I am not literally saying that you should tune out or not attend class. What I'm saying is you should focus on the analysis section of your exam in class. Remember, we've talked about how the analysis section is where you really get points. When your professor is Socratically asking hypothetical questions, they are talking about the analysis section of your exam answer. Listen to those questions. Think in your head about how you would answer those, how you would use facts for one party or another in response to that hypothetical, because it's exactly what you're going to be doing on the exam. That's the kind of practice that you want to have. Don't necessarily listen or put too much stock, I'll say, in the answers of your peers, especially if the professor doesn't seem to be buying those answers. But instead, think about how you would answer the question. When you're sitting there and you're not answering the questions in class, you are like a baseball player who's standing in the batter's box about to go up and hit. You're watching the pitches come in. You're taking practice swings. You're thinking about how you would swing at that ball or not. That's exactly what you're doing in class when you're not answering questions, which is most of the time, you are watching others at the plate swinging. You're going to be at the plate on your exam. That's when it matters. And so you need to be thinking, just like the batter in the batter's box, about how you're going to deal with those questions, those pitches on the exam. In your outline that you have with you in class that you're starting to develop, you might even take some notes about how the professor plays with the facts. Right? The professor might emphasize in the personal jurisdiction section that it mattered that International Shoe was probably this big, apparently international company. Of course they can defend a case in Washington. They're selling stuff there. We don't worry about that. But what if International Shoe is just a little sole proprietor, just somebody who is just making shoes out of their garage and sending them all over the country? Maybe to the professor, that's an interesting hypothetical. And so you should look out for facts on the exam, where the party is a big corporation versus a little guy. The little guy may have a better argument against jurisdiction in a state, a more compelling argument for avoiding jurisdiction. Whereas a plaintiff who wants to sue a non-resident defendant in a state may have a harder argument against that defendant versus a defendant that's a big corporation, where it seems just really intuitively fair to be able to sue them in Washington. So look at how the professor is playing with the various questions that you can ask under the human language. Who are these parties and why does that matter? What are these parties doing and why does that matter? What are their acts? What are they saying and why does that matter for the exam? What are they doing? What's their background? What's the context? What's the setting? See what kind of facts the professor is playing with and note that for the analysis section of your outline. Say, watch out for who these parties are. That might be a sentence you write in your personal jurisdiction outline. Watch out for a corporate defendant versus the little guy, because the professor's interested in that. And if this professor drops facts on the exam question about a little guy or about a big corporation, I want to remember that the professor talked about that in class. The professor was dropping a breadcrumb to say, I am going to test this issue. I'm interested in this. I think it's interesting. The professor won't drop breadcrumbs for everything. And some breadcrumbs, many of them, will not be tested on the exam. But the purpose of listening to those questions and focusing on the professor's questions and how you would answer them is to get better at answering them for the exam. As much as you can, you should be focusing on exam practice in law school. When you are thinking about how you would answer the professor's questions in class, you will be practicing for your exam. You'll be thinking, what would I write if this were the exam facts that I'm dealing with? And I'm asked to write an answer discussing the rights of the parties on your law school exam. That's what you should focus on, not so much answers of your peers that may or may not be what the professor is looking for. Listen for the professor's follow-up answers. So I said zone out in class, and it was a bit of a trick. I didn't actually mean it. What I meant was that if you are overwhelmed in class, if you don't understand where the conversation is going, go in with your outline already a little bit drafted, issue statement, and some rule statements that you're getting from the cases. And then listen to the professor's questions to confirm what the issue is, what the rule is, and then listen to the questions about how the professor might mess around with facts on an exam to get you to write a creative, but also strong and persuasive exam answer, making arguments for the parties in the exam problem based on the facts that the professor is interested in playing around with. That's what you should focus on. Not necessarily the things that overwhelm you and discussions that overwhelm you. In particular, I will say, if students are asking wild hypothetical questions in your class, they're probably misguided. If students are asking about edge cases that are unlikely to ever happen, they're probably misguided. It's not the students' hypotheticals that matter. If a student says, well, what if this were the facts of Air National Shoot? It's not necessarily the most important thing you're going to hear that day. What matters is what the professor says. And especially if the professor tries to get away from that hypothetical quickly, you know the professor's interested in something else. So you need to be focusing on what the professor is interested in because that's what you're tested on, not what some student says in their hypothetical. So maybe that's the point where you zone out so you can be ready to pay robust attention and take notes on the content of the class that gets to the analysis section of your outline and of your exam answer. So I hope this was helpful to start thinking about how to use law school class productively to maximize your success on the exam at the end of the semester. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I look forward to talking with you more about these topics next time. We'll see you then.

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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.