Top-Law-Schools.com

An incredibly useful website for anyone in or preparing to go to law school:

Welcome to Top-Law-Schools.com, a free and valuable resource to assist students applying to law schools. Top-Law-Schools.com offers 2008 law school rankings, exclusive law school profiles, advice for writing law school personal statements, and a law school forum. Furthermore, Top-Law-Schools.com has several articles offering more detailed law school rankings and discussions.

Top-Law-Schools.com was created by Ken De Leon, a graduate of UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School, to provide you with the necessary information to successfully navigate you through the law school application process and find the ideal law school, so that your next three years can be as rewarding and enjoyable as possible.

Recent Top Law Schools Forum Topics (view 100 latest posts)

Here is the website's section for people thinking about going to law school and a good selection of books to prepare you for law school.

Also, a great article from the website on how to succeed in law school. It is something I wish I had read before starting my first year. It looks like the author has come to the same conclusions I have on a number of issues. Here's an excerpt:

I am generally opposed to the concept of casebooks. I do not mean to disparage any particular professor’s case book. Reading case books is likely very helpful training tools for those entering academia, but, in my opinion, they are not very useful as aids in preparing for the exam. I consider spending an inordinate amount of time reading case books to be a distraction from real study. Be careful not to be fooled into thinking you are on track because you are up to date on the casebook readings.

I do not recommend briefing cases. If I am assigned a fifty-page reading in contracts, I will treat it differently than the rest of the class. The rest of the class will go home and read all fifty pages. They will brief all cases, and spend a lot of time taking notes, highlighting, and writing in the margins. They will spend some time thinking about some of the proposed line of questions.

On the other hand, I will go home and take out my Case Summary book keyed to my class. I will also read the corresponding sections of the Examples and Explanations book for the class that explains and then applies the material. I will also read the sections of the hornbook, which is a treatise on that subject, relevant to the material. I will then read the assigned reading very quickly. I will only carefully read the heart of the court’s analysis, which I can easily spot because the case summary book, hornbook, and Examples and Explanations book have all pointed me toward it. The rest of the material will only get a quick read. My time is spent thinking about how this case will be tested on an exam and how it will fit on my dense outline. I see where the case fits in the scheme of things because my system is big-picture focused.

Some great advice indeed! Unfortunately, I actually listened to my prof last semester who recommended against commercial outlines and case summaries. Not a good move!

Here's a video of the founder describing the Top-Law-Schools.com: