First-Year Tips: The Ever-Popular "How to Read a Legal Opinion"

Orientation has brought a flock of new law students to the Zief Library, and reminded us that one of the hardest things about the beginning of law school was trying to make sense of the cases assigned for the first classes.

So this seems like a good time to alert our new students to How to Read a Legal Opinion (now available for downloading at SSRN's Legal Scholarship Network). As author GWU Professor Orin Kerr puts it in the abstract, this  popular and demystifying essay "is designed to help new law students prepare for the first few weeks of class. It explains what judicial opinions are, how they are structured, and what law students should look for when reading them."