ZiefBrief

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." 

First-Year Tips: CALI Exercises

Even though I was a pretty dedicated law student, there were certain concepts that I had a hard time grasping during my first year of law school.  In Property, the rule against perpetuities gave me fits.  In Contracts, it was the parol evidence rule.   In Civil Procedure, I was bedeviled by joinder rules.  I spent an inordinate amount of time puzzling over these concepts, reviewing hornbooks, commercial exam prep materials, and any other resource that I could get my hands on, hoping that one of these resources would magically make these concepts clearer to me.

These days, first-year law students don't have to struggle quite so much thanks to CALI.  CALI is a non-profit organization comprised of U.S. law school members, and it has over 700 interactive, online tutorials covering almost all of the major legal concepts that you will encounter during your first year of law school and lots of upper-division subjects as well.   Law professors write the tutorials out of the goodness of their hearts to demystify tough legal concepts and help law students test their grasp of these rules.  The CALI Editorial Board reviews each new draft exercise before posting it on the CALI website to help ensure that lessons are accurate and engaging. 

All you need to access CALI lessons online is a USF student registration code, which you can pick up from a USF librarian at the law library reference desk at any time.  Once you register, you've got access to CALI for the rest of your law school career.  We'll also be bringing CALI student access codes to this Friday's first-year orientation fair, along with fabulous free gifts and a chance to win a basket of goodies by playing our trivia game.  Stop by and see us!

Googling Your Way to Trial Victory

Want to find out how members of your jury really think?  Google them and read their blogs and social networking pages.  The National Law Journal reports that increasing numbers of litigators are turning to the Internet in order to get a better handle on how to craft arguments that will win over jurors.  Attorneys are also using Internet research to help them select jurors. 

In one example discussed in the article, a jury consultant was hired to work for the plaintiff in a products liability case involving a worker who was injured when he was forced to climb inside of a machine.  The consultant discovered from a potential juror's MySpace page that he was in a claustrophobe's support group.  The jury consultant urged the attorney to keep the juror on the panel, the claustrophobic juror ended up as the jury foreperson, and the plaintiff prevailed. 

Of course, some jurors may not take kindly to such tactics, and at least one litigator quoted in the article worried about the ethics of prying into jurors' online lives.  Until the profession better defines the parameters of permissible research about jury pools, it's safe to assume that litigants are going to take advantage of search engines and social networking sites to help them prevail at trial.

Attorney's Bar License In Jeopardy After Street Racing Death

We all know that having a license to practice law doesn't necessarily stop attorneys from engaging in negligent or criminal behavior.  However, until today, I never heard of an attorney who jeopardized his or her bar license by engaging in drag racing on public streets (!).  According to this Law.com report, attorney Kenneth Morgan of Tulsa, Oklahoma pled no contest to felony manslaughter after his law partner and friend, Andre Carolina, was killed in an accident that occurred during a 1 a.m. street race on Tulsa's public streets.  Carolina was a passenger in Morgan's car when an intoxicated Morgan lost control of his car during the race.  The Oklahoma bar hasn't yanked Morgan's license yet, but I think it's pretty hard to argue that drunken drag racing on public streets doesn't involve a hefty dose of "moral turpitude."  I would be surprised if Morgan emerges from this horrible incident as an attorney. 

Aftershocks From the LA Quake Hit State Bar

Somehow, we knew that this story wasn't going away anytime soon.  The National Law Journal has an article today, "Complaints Surface Over Bar Exam Disrupted by Earthquake," which details concerns that some test-takers had about the proctors' reaction to the quake.  Apparently, some proctors refused to grant any extra time in one area of the Ontario Convention Center test location despite falling ceiling tiles, while proctors in another test area at the same locale told test-takers they would receive an additional five minutes on the essay portion of the test, but then called time without granting the extra minutes.  One test-taker stated, "If I were a person who did not pass, and it was by five points, and I was in a room that got a five-minute disruption from the earthquake, I would definitely protest it. I would definitely make it an issue."   Most of the people who took the bar are now sunning themselves on a beach somewhere, so I don't think we'll hear much more about this issue until November when test scores are released.  But come November, I think the Cal State Bar will be contending with more than a few complaints from Los Angeles-area test-takers who failed the exam by just a few points.

Bar Examinees All Shook Up

Kevin Underhill's very funny blog, Lowering the Bar, has this wry report on the impact that last Tuesday's 5.4 earthquake had on bar examinees in the Los Angeles area.  According to Kevin, some of the test-takers were more rattled than others:

"One of my friends was in tears during the exam because she was so scared," reported the source.  "It was a pretty jarring event for people who were already under time constraints and enormous pressure," he said, noting that he had some difficulty continuing to type in a shaking room with shaking hands.  Yes, as you might have expected, many continued to type during an earthquake even as others were fleeing the room or taking shelter.  "A lot of people," the source reported, "did do the half-and-half method of ducking under the tables WITH their laptops so they could keep on typing."  You know, that kind of determination, plus 1900 billables a year, is just the sort of thing that might get you made partner someday.

For those of you wondering if the State Bar is going to grade more leniently because of the quake, the National Law Journal has this quote from Director Hawley:

Any interruption weighs heavily upon the takers," Hawley said. As a result, the State Bar is gathering data on the disruption that, along with reports from experts in psychometrics, will be presented to the committee of bar examiners in order to measure the earthquake's possible impact on test scores.