Episodes
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Introduction: Make the Most of Your Investment
Welcome to The Law School Playbook! I’m Halle Hara, a professor of academic success and personal skills coach to law students and attorneys. I’m glad you’re here! Congratulations on the steps you have taken toward earning your law degree. If you are a 1L just starting out, these letters on law...
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Case Reading Topic 1: Please Read
At the risk of sounding like a nagging parent, I implore you to please read for class—it is not optional. I know if you had your druthers, you’d mark every assignment on your syllabi with “TL; DR,” for “too long, didn’t read,” especially in the busiest year of your academic life. However, you are...
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Case Reading Topic 2: Think Beyond the Screen
I’m a few years older than you. When I wanted information growing up, I turned to an outdated set of encyclopedias my parents bought from a door-to-door salesman or I went to the library. Reading is different today. Inquiring minds no longer grab the musty, dust-covered encyclopedias from the…
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Case Reading Topic 3: Find Your Inner Purpose
My goal is not only to change if you read but also how you read for law school. For instance, you may be reading for class because you don’t want to be embarrassed if you are called on or want to cross the assignment off your always-growing “to do” list. When reading experts instruct you to read...
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Case Reading Topic 4: Energy Matters
We’ve all had those moments when we are sitting in front of a book, with our head resting on our hand, when our eyes begin to close. You tell yourself that you are “just resting your eyes,” which is something my Dad would say to me if I tried to change the channel when he was asleep on the couch....
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Case Reading Topic 5: Find Your Inner Actor
If you find yourself just getting through your reading assignments, you’re not alone. The good news is that there are easy strategies that take no additional time but will ensure you’ll get a lot more out of your reading. One of those strategies involves finding your inner actor.
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Case Reading Topic 6: Bring Your Knowledge With You
I was lucky enough to work in the federal trial court for a collective fifteen years. During that time, and in private practice, I saw countless jury trials. Whether civil or criminal, the trials always had one thing in common: the judge instructed the jury to exercise their common sense in...
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Case Reading Topic 7: Bring Your Opinions With You
Law students, particularly in their first year, look for truth in the cases that they read. Even second-year law students likely figure that the judge knows much more about a given topic than they do, so they read cases to see what they can learn.
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Case Reading Topic 8: Talk to Yourself
Some people say that talking to yourself means you’re crazy. Other people say that talking to themselves is the only way they can have an intelligent conversation. In this coaching session, I will explain how, jokes aside, talking to yourself as you read really does give rise to an intelligent...
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Case Reading Topic 9: Time Matters
There is no question that time is the elephant in the room throughout the entire law school experience—there just isn’t enough of it. All law students struggle with time management, even those that are high achieving and well organized. The phrase “time matters” is not just relevant in law…
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Case Reading Topic 10: Find Your Inner Artist
Who says law school doesn’t foster creativity? To the contrary, an effective reading strategy involves visualizing or using imagery to picture what is being described in your law school text.
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Case Reading Topic 11: Recognize the Strategies
We have discussed numerous strategies that can prompt you to be an engaged, critical thinker while reading. It is important for you to recognize, however, that your willingness to continually monitor your own thoughts and assess your own understanding as you read is essential to you becoming an...
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Case Reading Topic 12: Put It All Together
My parents were avid golfers when I was a teen. Every so often I’d join them on the golf course, although I was pretty unskilled. I’d step up to the tee and the well-intentioned coaching from my parents inevitably followed: keep your head down, your arms straight, nice and easy, focus on the…
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Reading and Interpreting Statutes Introduction: Enacted Laws Abound
The law school experience is so focused on reading and interpreting appellate cases that students sometimes overlook the central role that legislation plays in practice. The reading and interpretation strategies in this series of episodes pertains to many kinds of enacted law (or requirements…
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Reading and Interpreting Statutes Topic 1: Don't Grill, Barbecue
Celebrity chef Guy Fieri has said: There are two different things: there’s grilling, and there’s barbecue. Grilling is when people say, ‘We’re going to turn up the heat, make it really hot and sear a steak, sear a burger, cook a chicken.’ Barbecue is going low and slow.
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Reading and Interpreting Statutes Topic 2: In the Words of Sophocles, “Without Labor, Nothing Prospers”
So today, our work of reading and interpreting statutes continues. After the first step—slowing down—the next step is to determine how the statute fits into the big picture. As you learned with case reading, background knowledge, even if acquired just prior to reading the text, makes you a…
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Reading and Interpreting Statutes Topic 3: Find Meaning
We are continuing our discussion of reading and interpreting statutes. To recap the steps we have covered thus far, when approaching a statute, you must: …
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Reading and Interpreting Statutes Topic 4: Craft an Argument
Today, we are picking up our ongoing discussion of reading and interpreting statutes. We will discuss the final step in this episode, which is to resolve ambiguities or to add clarity to vague language.
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Reading and Interpreting Statutes Topic 5: Let's Practice (Steps 1 and 2)
In this episode, we will be focusing on steps 1 and 2 of reading and interpreting statutes, which we know are to: slow down (step 1) and determine how the statute fits into the big picture by looking at surrounding statutory materials (step 2).
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Reading and Interpreting Statutes Topic 6: Let's Practice (Step 3)
We are going to pick up where we left off in the last episode, where a commercial airline pilot named Sean Fitzgerald showed up for work “rip-roaring drunk” and engaged in pre-flight work before he was arrested. The statute he is alleged to have violated is 18 U.S.C. § 343, and we are now at step...
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Reading and Interpreting Statutes Topic 7: Let’s Practice (Steps 4 and 5)
Today, we are going to pick up where we left off in the last episode, where commercial airline pilot Sean Fitzgerald showed up for work “rip-roaring drunk” and engaged in pre-flight work before he was arrested. The statute he is alleged to have violated is 18 U.S.C. § 343, and we are now at step…
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Legal Analysis Topic 1: Law Can be Like Math
Today we will begin our discussion of legal analysis. We have all heard it time and time again: the purpose of law school is to train you to “think law a lawyer.” As the infamous Professor Kingsfield told his students in the 1973 film The Paper Chase, you come to law school “with a skull full a...
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Legal Analysis Topic 2: Law Can be Like Science
The topic we are addressing today is inductive reasoning, another well-known type of reasoning often used in law school and in practice. While you are more likely to see rule-based reasoning on law school exams (particularly during your first year), my guess is that you’ve talked about inductive...
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Legal Analysis Topic 3: Law is Deliberate
Welcome to The Law School Playbook! I’m Halle Hara, a professor of academic success and personal skills coach to law students and attorneys. I’m glad you’re here! It’s so difficult for me to believe that I started law school almost 25 years ago. There are a lot of things I don’t remember about 25...
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Legal Analysis Topic 4: Avoid the Pitfalls
If you’ve listened to the episodes on deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and policy-based reasoning, you know there is a lot of room for creativity in conducting legal analysis. This is one of the many reasons lawyering is challenging but also fun. Deciding which type of legal reasoning to...
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Mind Matters Topic 1: Know Your Mindset
When students come to me feeling stressed and defeated, sometimes wondering if they can continue on in law school, we discuss their mindset and how much it matters. Stanford Professor and Psychologist Carol Dweck explains that there are two types of mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.
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Mind Matters Topic 2: Persist
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying that law school is a marathon and not a sprint. At the heart of that saying is that to navigate law school successfully, you must have resolve, persistence, or staying power. But how do you do that day after day when the workload is so demanding?
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Mind Matters Topic 3: Overcome
In the last episode I highlighted the work of Angela Duckworth in her New York Times bestseller Grit: The Power and Passion of Perseverance. Today, I’m going to focus on a different book called Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges by Steven M. Southwick and Dennis S....
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Mind Matters Topic 4: Evolve and Be Kind
So far in the mind matters series, we’ve discussed having a growth mindset, grit, and using resilience to overcome difficulties. In this episode, I want to focus on habits.