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?"

Pretend that the person you love wants out of law school the same thing you wanted out of law school.

Multiple suggestions, multiple comment boxes.

-- AndrewGradman - 24 Apr 2008

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I'll go first.

I define "doing better" as "minimizing the effort to get good grades," hypothesizing that confidence in one's future grades impacts happiness, ability to learn, and all the other qualities of life.

Your learning will comprise two functions: paraphrasing, into your own words, the primary sources (syllabus & lecture) and the secondary sources (G-drive outlines).

Lesson 1: Only bother with the primary sources when they differ from the secondary sources. If you find good G-Drive outlines, you'll rarely need to take class notes, because your teacher's lecture will differ little from past years' outlines; and you'll only need to read a few cases -- won't even need to buy a casebook -- if you find your syllabus fully represented there.

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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 relative term, a social construct, a function of the curve.

• Define a person empathizing with the professor in terms of how your peers empathize with your professor.
  • Do this either by forming a study group (present classmates), or by using multiple G-drive outlines (past classmates).

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Information equals ordered data. In principle, one single document could come into being that permits future students to empathize with and predict the professor without buying a casebook or transcribing a word of lecture. My outlines for Contracts and Civil Procedure, combining the best of six G-Drive outlines, might permit a student to do this. I plan to contribute them to the G-Drive.

But that's part of the problem: the addition of outlines makes it MORE difficult for future 1Ls to qualify all the data. If our goal is to provide the 1L with more information and less data, we should lower the costs to him of identifying information. We must identify for him 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; tweak the assignments of rights & persons as they 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.

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-- AndrewGradman - 24 Apr 2008