This post offers 5 maxims to help first semester JD students begin their outlines.
Outlining basics for 1st semester law students
Author: Chelsea Baldwin
Chelsea is at Washburn University School of Law working with Marsha Griggs in the Academic Excellence and Bar Pass programs. Chelsea has been working in law school academic support and bar prep since 2009. She has helped students pass the bar exam in numerous jurisdictions including (but not limited to) Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Nevada. Currently, she is focusing on helping 1Ls hit their law school stride, and helping 2Ls and 3Ls overcome success impediments carrying forward from their early law school careers.
Using practice problems to learn law – differences between novices and experts
In this post, Professor Baldwin shares her observations about how students in different stages of expertise development use practice problems to aid learning law.
Rule statements in informal legal writing, part 1
In part 1 of "Rule statement in informal legal writing," Professor Baldwin articulates the attributes that distinguish rule statements from other sentences in written legal analysis and discusses the first two attributes in some depth.
CB’s Tech Tips: Generating a Table of Contents
Modern word processing software makes it incredibly easy to generate a table of contents for documents. However, that feature is predicated on users applying styles to document text to instruct the program on which text snippets need to be listed in the table of contents and thereby what pages that content can be found on.… Continue reading CB’s Tech Tips: Generating a Table of Contents
Framing legal issues in informal legal writing
This post delineates the differences in issue-framing for formal and informal legal writing and provides examples of the three classic strategies to frame issues in the time pressures of law school exams.
“One weird trick” to improve retention
Cue the puzzled looks. "Adding an activity to the beginning of my reading can help me read faster?"
Time Management meet project management (i.e., Legal Writing assignments)
This post offers an example of how to break a big project (the closed memo) into a bunch of tasks that can be sprinkled throughout one's schedule to ensure timely completion.
CB’s Tech Tips: Word Processing Styles
This post walks through applying "styles" in Microsoft Word. Using styles helps increase efficiency in formatting documents, generates click navigation within a document, and unlocks the table of contents generator tool.
Time management: How do I get it all done?
In this post, Professor Baldwin shares an agenda template to help students incorporate review into daily study activities.
7 Tips for the first semester of law school
Professor Baldwin shares the 7 tips for first semester with students at orientation. Here they are for you.
Professor Chelsea Baldwin 