With the start of a new semester, we start to hear from students (especially first-year students) who did not meet their own expectations. And while an exam review can be helpful for students, reading skills can often be a foundational cause of such challenges and something that a struggling student may not recognize the need to improve.

A law student who struggles with legal reading comprehension also often struggles with critical thinking about what to extract from a case to help them solve a future legal problem.[1] This can then lead to challenges with processing the law (outlining) and applying the law (taking exams).[2] And as Susan Landrum pointed out at her excellent presentation on “The Countdown to the NextGen UBE” at the AALS Annual Meeting, reading is one of those most fundamental skills that will also be key to a student’s success on the NextGen UBE—and one that students coming into law school continue to wrangle with.

For some, the Spring semester can be even more difficult for first-year law students. For example, at our school, students transition from Civil Procedure, Contracts, and Torts in the Fall, to Property, Criminal Law, and Constitutional Law in the Spring—courses we tend to see them face greater reading comprehension challenges in. Additionally, because students are now in their second semester, the same initial skill building that first-semester professors engaged in (whether in doctrinal or academic success courses), may not be as consistently supported in the Spring.

Outlined below are some suggestions for supporting law student reading that can be implemented in your teaching this semester for longer-term returns in student success:

• Give Students Options on How to Prime Their Learning. A student who primes their learning with a supplement can often better understand the context of the case they are about to read.[3] However, in today’s digital age and with students who have demonstrated attention span challenges, alternatives to some of the more traditional book options should be made available. For example, if your school has a subscription to learning supplement libraries, like West Academic or Aspen Learning Library, both include audio lessons. Many students will use these for exam preparation, such as Richard Freer’s Law School Legends Audio (a very popular Civ Pro supplement at our school). However, these can just as easily be repurposed for learning prior to reading a case. Similarly, many bar prep companies offer free law student resources, including overview videos that are mini versions of their bar prep lectures. These videos can be used in the same way to help a student understand a concept, such as the Commerce Clause, before a student starts to read the many opinions in their casebook on the topic.
• Adjust Reading Focus from Fact Summaries to Legal Takeaways. For students who struggle, the process of case briefing can many times result in a fact-heavy recitation of information—something that will help them feel successful in a Socrative dialogue in class but may not seem to directly connect to their outlining or exams. With students who struggled on their exams, I sometimes find it helpful to teach them to focus first on the issue and rule takeaway, then the legal sources and arguments supporting that outcome, and finally the legally relevant facts. Reordering their reading process and takeaways from fact and procedural recitations first can help a student understand that the law (which is what their outline should highlight) is key, while the facts support that outcome (and should show up in their outlines as examples). Not only can this help a student better see that cases are not just wells of facts, but it can also help them see more clearly the legal sources and analysis necessary to solve problems they will inevitably see on exams and in practice.

Given that exam performance may be a symptom of a more foundational skill challenge, such as reading, adapting traditionally proven methods of learning strategies can be helpful as we continue to work with ever-evolving student bodies.

What innovative ways have you found helpful to support law student reading challenges?

(Erica M. Lux)

[1] Patricia Grande Montana, Bridging the Reading Gap in the Law School Classroom, 45 Capital Univ. L. Rev. 433, 446 (2017).

[2] Id.

[3] Michael Hunter Schwartz & Paula J. Manning, Expert Learning for Law Students 65–68 (3d ed. 2018).