Before I get onto that, I want to emphasise one point. I once read some- where that the difference between school and university is that at school you are a pupil and at university you are a student. Pupils learn by being
taught; while students learn by studying – by finding out things for them-
selves. The distinction holds especially true of law students – as I said in a previous letter, law is probably the most self-taught subject that you can study at university. So you shouldn’t rely too much on lectures and small- group teaching sessions as a vehicle for finding out about the law. You should rather regard lectures and small-group teaching sessions as pro- viding you with opportunities to pick up useful titbits of information and to test out your blossoming legal skills.
But you mustn’t misunderstand me. I don’t want to encourage you to skip lectures and the small-group teaching sessions that have been laid on for you. While they are not an essential component of your legal education,
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they provide a very useful service that you should take full advantage of. But please remember that it is how much work you put in on your own – or in conjunction with your fellow students – that will determine how well you do in your exams, not how many lectures you have been to. If you are spending 60% of your ‘working time’ as a law student at lectures and small-group teaching sessions, and only 40% of the remaining time working on your own or with your fellow students – then you are in trou- ble. You are not giving yourself enough of an opportunity to develop as a law student by working away at the law yourself, rather than having it spoon-fed to you by your teachers. A healthier distribution of your work- ing time to aim for is: spend 70% of your ‘working time’ studying on your own, or with your fellow students, and only 30% of your time attending lectures or small-group teaching sessions. If your university has laid on so many lectures for you to attend that this is impractical, think about split- ting up the lectures with your fellow students so that you can cut down on the number you have to attend in person.
Lectures
Okay – let’s get on with some guidance as to what you should be doing in lectures. Basically, you should be looking to make notes of points that will make useful additions to your topic and case files. So keep your ears open for:
1 Summaries of cases. These can be really useful, particularly if the lec-
turer is talking about a case which is very difficult to understand. Lecturers will usually work really hard to make cases comprehensible to the students that they are lecturing to – if only because it’s really embarrassing for a lecturer to speak to an audience that is looking at her with blank incomprehension. If a lecturer is explaining a case and some aspect of her explanation seems particularly obscure, do not hes-
itate to stick your hand up and ask her to express herself more clearly.
Some lecturers don’t like to be interrupted by questions (though per- sonally I welcome it – as I have already made clear, asking questions is much the most effective way of finding out about a subject). But you shouldn’t care about that – your lecturers are working for you, not the other way around. If you want to ask a question, you have a right to ask it and have it answered.
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2 Summaries of articles. Again, these are very useful – a really good sum-
mary of what an article says can make the actual article a breeze to read through subsequently. I should emphasise that if an article has been summed up very effectively in a lecture, I wouldn’t advise skipping the article in your subsequent reading on the basis that you already know what it says. However effective the summary, it is only a summary and there may be more in the actual article that you may find worth taking a note on – perhaps a summary of a case or an interesting argument.
3 Evaluations of the law. It is always useful to note what your lecturer
thinks of a particular area of the law – and what arguments he makes in support of his views.
4 Hints as to what will be in the exam. Obviously these are very useful –
but hard to pick up. No lecturer is going to stand up and say, ‘There is going to be a question on this subject in the exam.’ However, if your lec- turer is involved in setting the paper and spends a lot of time talking about a particular subject or issue, then it’s worth making a note of that fact and giving that subject or issue special attention in your revision.
How can you find out who is setting a particular exam? Well, your university won’t tell you, but here’s a handy tip. Suppose you want to find out who will be setting the paper in criminal law that you are sit- ting this year. Usually, universities operate a three-year cycle for examining so that the same academic sets a particular exam for three years in a row and is then rotated off examining duties entirely or into examining a different subject. Universities also usually issue ‘Examiners’ Reports’, which are written every year after the exams have been marked by the examiners who set the exams. These reports contain reflections on how students performed in the exams, usually livened by a few funny ‘bloopers’ that the markers came across in marking the exams. So if you want to find out who is going to be setting the criminal law exam this year, get the ‘Examiner’s Report’ for the criminal law paper for the last three years. If the examiner who wrote the ‘Examiner’s Report’ for criminal law last year
didn’t also write the ‘Examiner’s Report’ for the two years before
that, then it’s likely that she will be setting the criminal law paper this
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year – her three-year stint as the criminal law examiner won’t yet have ended. This method isn’t foolproof, though. For example, last year’s examiner might have gone on leave and not be involved with exam- ining this year. So keep your ears open for any gossip as to who might be setting the exams in the papers you are going to be taking.
5 Aids to remembering cases. You should also be looking to take notes on
any ‘story lines’ that you can make use of to remember a string of cases, following the advice I gave you in my letter on ‘Reading Cases and Statutes’. So – make notes of any general principles that the lecturer has identified as underlying a number of cases or any speculations that the lecturer has as to why a number of cases were decided the way they were. You shouldn’t be looking to make notes on the following:
1 Statements of basic legal rules. Suppose your lecturer says, ‘A defendant
will have the mens rea of murder if he has an intention to kill or an intention to cause grievous bodily harm.’ There’s absolutely no point in your making a note of that. Your textbook reading will tell you that – so why wear out your hand trying to scribble this piece of information down in the middle of the lecture? It would be better to put your pen down, give your hand a rest and wait for the lecturer to tell you some- thing that you won’t necessarily find in a textbook.
This takes me onto a more general point. If your lecturer on a par- ticular subject isn’t telling you anything that you couldn’t find in a textbook, then you should stop going to his lectures. This is for a very simple reason: you can read faster than your lecturer can talk. So you would make better use of the hour that the lecture will last reading a textbook rather than attending the lecture. You will find out more in that hour by reading the textbook than you will by attending the lecture.
2 History. Lecturers often like to preface their discussion of a particular
area of law with a quick run through of the history of that area. So, for example, if you are being lectured by your tort law lecturer on the law on ‘Occupiers’ Liability’, she may well spend a bit of time talking about what the law said before the Occupiers’ Liability Acts of 1957 and 1984 were
LETTER 14 GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR TEACHERS
enacted. Making notes on this is a complete waste of time. You are inter- ested in what the law says now, not in what it said 50 or 20 years ago. You are interested in what reforms should be made to the law as it is now, not in what reforms were made to the law as it was 50 or 20 years ago. Having said that, history does have its place. It can help you to remem- ber a string of cases if you see them as part of some historical trend or pattern. Arguments that a particular reform to the law has proved unsuccessful and that the law should return to where it was before that reform was implemented are always interesting and worth noting. But if the lecturer is talking about the history of a particular area of law for no other reason than as a way of introducing that area of law or because he is loath to abandon a set of carefully composed lecture notes that have been made completely redundant by a recent reform, then put your pen down and give yourself a rest.
When a lecture is over, take the notes that you have made on the lecture and use them to make fresh notes in the appropriate places in your topic and case files. This will serve a number of useful purposes:
Your lecture notes are likely to be quite scruffy and messy – making
fresh notes will mean you don’t have to rely on your lecture notes.
Making fresh notes will help you remember in the long term what
was said in the lectures.
Making fresh notes will give you a chance to look over your lec-
ture notes and see how many of the lecture notes you made actu- ally seem, on reflection, worth entering into your topic and case files. If the answer is ‘Not many’, you are taking too many notes in the lectures and you need to be more discriminating in your note taking.
Making fresh notes will then allow you to make someone else a
present of your lecture notes without worrying about whether you will ever see them again – very useful if you are looking to get into a study group or if you and another person are taking it in turns to make notes on lectures.
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