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Speed Reading a Case How to Brief a Case
Speed v. Comprehension Sample Case and Brief
Prereading Strategy Beyond the Casebook: Study
Taking Notes While Reading Tools
Cases and Casebooks a Brief Legal Dictionary
History Commercial Outlines
The Structure of a Casebook Hornbooks
Why Brief a Case? Study Groups
2Ls and 3Ls
Practice Exams and Model
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Speed Reading a Case
Reading your first case is like reading a foreign language you know only slightly. You might recognize
the words, but you have to translate the concepts into English. You haven't begun to think in the
foreign language yet.
Like a foreign language, case law contains terms not familiar to the first year law student. Cases are
written by lawyers for lawyers, consequently the writing contains technical legal jargon and is
structured for the legal mind instead of the layperson. To make it even more difficult, judges often use
awkward syntax or complex words where simple ones would suffice. It doesn't help that law
professors typically dish out a difficulttounderstand case in the first week of law school as a rite of
passage to separate the serious students from the laggards.
Typically, the average first year law student reads only three pages an hour in their first month of law
school. By the end of the first semester, most students read ten pages an hour and keep at that pace
until the end of their second year. However, with the right techniques, you can start at ten pages an
hour and leap to twenty or thirty pages within your first semester.
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Speed v. Comprehension
There are two ways to measure effective reading speed and comprehension. Generally, the more
speed you have, the lower your comprehension. However, if you are familiar with the subject matter
or know the author well, then you can generally pick up the pace of the reading without sacrificing
comprehension. Prereading is a strategy that achieves that goal.
For most people, comprehension falls off sharply the more quickly a person reads. Assuming all other
factors are constant, a student has to put in a certain amount of hours reading in order to get a B
average.
Prereading gives you an edge by building comprehension into the equation. Thus you start out
knowing a few things about the case before actually reading, thereby allowing you to read faster and
retain more information. In math terms, the curve shifts before falling off. With prereading, the same
student as above can put in fewer hours and still maintain his B average.
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Prereading Strategy
By prereading the case, you can decide whether to skim, skip or read a section. This dramatically
reduces the time you spend reading unnecessary material.
STEPBYSTEP: READING STRATEGY
Step 1: Preread a case.
> Read the topic sentence of every paragraph.
> Spend 2 minutes for every 10 pages.
Step 2: Based on prereading, choose the most effective strategy to read each paragraph.
> Skimming
> Skipping
> Reading
Step 1: Prereading
Prereading gives you the gist of the case to determine whether to skim, skip or thoroughly read a
case. Prereading is not skimming. Skimming is a more thorough reading of the material than pre
reading. You should resist the impulse to skim the entire case as you preread. Think of prereading as
a superficial skimming of the material.
Prereading a 10page long case in the typical casebook should take no longer than two to three
minutes. However, that scant three minutes will take a three pageanhour reader to ten pagesanhour
almost immediately. A ten pageanhour reader can leap to twenty pagesanhour with a little practice.
HOW TO PREREAD
Prereading consists of the following steps.
Step 1: Read the case name.
Step 2: Read the first paragraph or two to understand who the parties are and the issue
that brought them to court.
Most cases will give the procedural history, parties and issues in the first two
paragraphs.
Step 3: Read the first sentence of each paragraph.
By reading every topic sentence of every paragraph you should get an idea of the
structure and general direction that the case is going towards.
Step 4: Read the last paragraph or two so that you understand the holding and
disposition of the case.
Not every holding will be given in the last two paragraphs, but the author usually will
sum up the ideas of the case as a conclusion in the final paragraphs.
The overview all comes down to getting the big picture sooner. Once you have an overview of a case,
you know enough of the contents to read the case quickly and easily. There are four things that you
identify as you preread.
1. Outcome
2. Elements of the Case
3. Legal Concepts
4. Evolution of Reasoning
Outcome: By knowing the outcome, you have a ready context for the reasoning. Although the
suspense is gone, you know where the judge is going with his or her application of the rule.
Elements of the case: You've identified where the judge actually talks about the procedural history,
facts, statement of rule, reasoning, holding, etc. See Chapter ___ for more detail on the structure or
elements of a case. You should have an easier time going straight to a particular section in order to
mentally brief a case.
Legal concepts: Instead of having each legal concept revealed to you one by one, you have the big
picture ahead of time. A typical Contracts case, for example, might discuss many different rules all in
the context of one issue. By knowing that three distinct rules come into play, you pinpoint the most
relevant rule ahead of time.
Evolution of Reasoning: Typically, a judge will step through a case such that he or she cites the
development of a rule from the common law through the debates in the legislature when the current
law was originally passed. Some of this is superfluous for your purposes.
Step 2: Skimming, Skipping or Reading
Skipping: As a result of prereading, you can determine which paragraphs you can skip altogether.
Judges often trace the development of a rule from the common law beginnings to its passage by the
legislature. Since the casebook usually groups similar cases together, you will find yourself going
through the same historical beginnings many times over. At some point, you can just skip this material
altogether.
Although it sounds counterintuitive, skipping can actually increase overall comprehension. Typically,
students become bored when they keep rereading the same material. By skipping through material that
is already familiar, you keep the pace fresh so that your mind doesn't wander.
Here are some typical paragraphs that you can skip:
Discussion of the historical basis of a rule that has already been discussed in a previous case.
Ancillary legal concepts that are not relevant to the legal concept being discussed.
Examples of a principle that you already understand.
Skimming: Skimming is different from prereading. Skimming means you are reading everything
lightly giving it the once over. In skimming, you don't read every word, but you do scan every
sentence. Instead of reading words as a single element, you read phrases. You use skimming when you
are basically familiar with the material but need more information than what you got out of the
overview.
Reading: Reading doesn't mean that you have to read every word. For most people, the mind is
quicker than the eye. The mind typically gets bored if you read every word. By training your eyes to
go quickly over each sentence, you can learn to read faster. It takes practice, and it's beyond the scope
of this book to offer exercises in speed reading cases. There are many fine speedreading books
available. It pays to learn and practice speedreading the summer before law school. Once the semester
starts, you will be hard pressed to read every assignment during your first semester. However, if you
haven't taken the time to learn how to speedread, then you can still benefit from the easy to learn pre
reading strategy.
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Taking Notes While Reading
One pitfall that most students fall into is highlighting nearly everything in a case. It's common in the
first year to think that everything is relevant. The trick is to preread without highlighting anything!
This can be tough because as you preread you get a sense of what is important and naturally want to
note it. However, you can never really know what is important until you read an entire piece.
By not highlighting anything on your first pass, you also save time in the long run when you outline.
When you outline, you return to a case a few weeks after you first read it. With unnecessary
highlighting, you end up spending a lot of time rereading to find out what is relevant in a given case.
On your second pass through the case, identify the relevant sections and highlight the issue, rule, facts,
analysis, policy, procedural history and other elements. Identify the elements with a notation in the
margin. Some students use different colored highlighters to identify different elements. One color is
used for the rule, another for the issue, and so on. This usually works well only for highly visual
people. For myself, I find that different colors slow you down and only add to the confusion of too
much highlighting.
As in all things, if it works for you and adds to your productivity and efficiency, then do it. Otherwise,
eliminating the clutter will speed you along your way.
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