One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School

Case reports provide the decisions of legal cases, including a summary of facts, discussions of legal issues, applicable laws, and judges’ opinions. Students read case reports for their weekly assignments, and they attempt to discern legal concepts and rules to discuss in class. For law school, case reports are compiled into casebooks based on course topics.

The case study is a method of instruction in legal education that utilizes real cases to discuss legal concepts. Students read through an assigned case and try to determine how a judge arrived at their ultimate decision, often comparing outcomes to similar cases to understand rules, issues, and concepts. In class, professors then question students about their understanding of the case and the issues it poses. Turow highlights the importance of the case study, but he believes it places too much emphasis on the judge’s decision and not on the lawyers’ arguments—and since most students will ultimately become lawyers, he believes the lawyer’s decisions should take precedence.

A course outline is a form of study aid that compiles a course’s main weekly concepts, issues, and cases, and distills the information into a single document. Course outlines can be mass-produced and sold by educational organizations, but Harvard faculty discourages students from relying on these to study. The alternative is student study groups developing their own course outlines throughout the term. Course outlines are laborious efforts that frequently take students away from their classes, but they prove deeply valuable, especially for exam revision.

The Harvard Law Guild is a student organization with the goal of reforming Harvard’s legal education curriculum and advocating for students. Guild members are notorious for being outspoken in class, and they will push back against the aggressiveness of professors or lessons that they feel are too conservative. A subsect of the Guild develops after the Incident, named Section 100, which aims to specifically air the grievances of Scott’s class of first-year students. Enthusiasm for the project quickly dwindles, and Section 100 dissolves after a few weeks.

A hornbook is a student resource that compiles a course’s key cases, while also providing summaries and analysis. Hornbooks are often written and edited by the professors who teach the courses, so many include nearly exact course material and lines of questioning. First year students are warned not to use hornbooks because the first-year courses are meant to help students develop those analytical skills on their own. Students, however, disregard this rule, as the hornbooks help them keep up with the often-overwhelming weekly reading assignments, especially when they fall behind.

The issue spotter is a style of law exam where the test questions prompt students to identify as many applicable rules as possible in a case and describe the implications of arguing for or against those rules. Students criticize this style of exam, as it relies heavily on rules memorization rather than demonstrating concepts discussed in class. Classroom discussions focus more on philosophical questions and connecting themes and issues across cases, so students don’t believe the issue-spotter accurately reflects their learning throughout the year.

Moot court is a second-term project that all first-year students must participate in and an optional competition for upper-year students. Moot court is also known as Ames, named after James Barr Ames, a legendary Harvard professor and dean. Students work with partners, choose a case, and research the applicable case law depending on which side of the case they’re defending. The students pretend that the cases occur in the mythical land of Ames, which allows them to pull support from cases and laws across the country. Unlike the Legal Methods assignment where pairs are given a fake case to argue, the moot court cases are all real and have existing judgements that students seek either to support or to overturn. Students work with an upper-year student advisor, write a brief, and then perform an oral argument in front of three judges. Most students take moot court very seriously because it offers them a chance both to practice their lawyerly skills and to compete directly with their peers.

The Socratic method, as practiced at Harvard Law School, is a style of teaching wherein a professor, often in a large classroom, questions a student for an extended period, moving from broad to specific questions. In law school, the Socratic method is intended to force students to think logically in a high-pressure situation, and to pull out key legal concepts from cases through their own analysis. When the chosen student doesn’t know the answer to a question, professors open the floor to the rest of the class to step in, but they frequently return to the initial student to continue the interrogation. All the first-year courses at Harvard employ the Socratic method, which many students fear as they enter the school. The Socratic method was introduced to Harvard by Christopher Columbus Langdell, a dean of the law school and a major education reformer.