Let's conduct a thought experiment. "If someone you loved were entering as a 1L in September of 2008, how would you help that person do better than you did?"

Mina makes a good point: "do you mean "do better" only in terms of grades? quality/amount of knowledge gained? overall experience (including social life)? or all of the above?"
I was going to respond: "I wanted to discover how we could be altruistic to 1Ls, assuming that we can't know why they came here."
But this class reminds us that you can't help someone succeed at CLS until you (or she) knows why she came to CLS.
Okay, new rule: when you answer the question, state what you think that the person you love wants out of law school -- and for best effect, make that equal to the thing you wanted out of law school.

Multiple comment boxes to correlate with multiple suggestions.

-- AndrewGradman - 24 Apr 2008

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work in progress.

I'll go first.

I hypothesize that confidence in one's future grades impacts happiness as well as one's ability to learn, so I define "doing better" as "minimizing the effort to get good grades," with the understanding that this achievement improves the other qualities of life.

Divide the labor (e.g. study group) into two functions: paraphrasing the primary sources (syllabus & lecture) and paraphrasing the secondary sources (G-drive outlines).

Lesson 1: Only bother with the primary sources when they differ from the secondary sources. You'll rarely need to take class notes, because your teacher's lecture will differ little from the G-Drive outlines reflecting past years; and, before the first day of class, you can determine that you'll only need to read a few cases -- that you don't even need to buy a casebook -- if you compare your syllabus with your g-drive outlines.

Holmes said that "The law consists of that paraphrase of Precedent that a judge is most likely to utter." (j/k.)
If

• the professor is a common-law Judge,
• each day's lecture is a Precedent,
• and the Law is the exam,

then

• the exam is the paraphrase of lectures that the professor is most likely to generate.
  
• We can approximate the most probable exam as the one which a person empathizing with the professor is most likely to write.
  

Lesson 2: DO NOT attempt to empathize with the professor privately; empathy is a social construct. Define a person empathizing with the professor in terms of how your peers empathize with your professor. Either do this by forming a study group, or by using multiple G-drive outlines (past classmates).

In principle, a single document could come into being that permits a future student to get a high grade without buying a casebook or transcribing a word of lecture. Indeed, my outlines for Contracts and Civil Procedure last semester would have permitted a student to do this, had my professors not, respectively, retired / been retired. I plan to contribute my outline to the G-Drive collection. To outlines one through six, there will now be seven.

Information equals the destruction of bad data. The problem is, that the addition of newer, better outlines makes it MORE difficult for future 1Ls to distinguish bad from good data. We are just adding new data, not new information, until we identify a force that can identify and destroy the bad data.

How do we find a Maxwell's Demon with the incentive to cull the data from the information?

Suppose a CLS Wiki. Not a free-for-all Wiki, like this one. Instead, each teaching assistant gets her own real estate; everyone else gets various posting rights in the neighboring real estate. The question is, What rights, and which people, do we assign to the respective pieces of real estate?

Lesson 3: Don't give up if an original assignment of rights & persons fails; tweak the model as it fails. This is an experiment. The Maxwell's Demon that you are creating is The Wiki itself; you owe it to the next generation of 1Ls to not give up.

-- AndrewGradman - 24 Apr 2008