Why Do Law Professor Counsel Against Commercial Outlines?

This is a question I have often wondered about. I listened to this counsel from one of my professors my first semester of law school and suffered for it. I put myself at a disadvantage compared to my classmates and missed out on getting a deeper understanding of the material as a result of it. Why do law professors recommend against commercial outlines?

Here's what one law professor has to say:

Why do so many law professors caution students to stay away from commercial outlines? Isn’t it a bit odd that we think students must be protected from certain books?

Perhaps commercial outlines are not the best way to learn the law. That’s arguable. I certainly hold the opinion that commercial outlines provide information that is woefully incomplete, at best.

But the attitude of much of the legal academy goes far beyond these modest contentions. Commercial outlines are treated as if they are intellectual poison. Wow. Does reading a commercial outline actually damage the ability of a student to learn? I can’t believe that. For one, I can’t believe commercial outlines wield quite so much power.

More to the point, I think my students are too smart to be injured by reading – whether it’s Karl Marx or Steven Emanuel.

In my classes, I encourage students to read commercial outlines (as well as anything else they find helpful). And the sooner the better. In my ideal world, all students would have a basic understanding of the blackletter law in a subject before reading the cases. It seems to me a sorry waste to read a case primarily to separate doctrine from chaff.

Agreed!

I want students to read cases at a higher intellectual level, casting a critical eye on the court, questioning the motives of the parties, and learning how the blackletter doctrine works, or doesn’t work, in the real world.

Remember chemistry? You probably started with the Bohr model of the atom, in which electrons orbit the nucleus like planets around a sun. The Bohr model of the atom is a terrific starting point for learning chemistry. It is also wrong. Later on in chemistry, you learn to think in terms of valence shells, understanding that electrons exist in spherical clouds of varying probability. It’s an open secret that the Bohr atom is incomplete and deceptive. But it’s still useful to beginning students.

Blackletter statements of law are like the Bohr model of the atom. They are inviting, easily comprehended, and wrong. And like the Bohr atom, a compilation of blackletter law in a commercial outline is a ready way to begin learning.

It makes me sad to think that many students may be sheltering themselves from commercial study aids and thus needlessly using a semester’s worth of case reading and class dialectic merely as a means to the end of creating a hard-won outline. I would rather them start with an outline in hand, and then spend the rest of the semester learning what’s wrong with it.

A much better approach indeed. And one I wish I had clued into earlier. Instead, I relied on some well-intended, but ultimately awful advice from a professor. Fortunately, I learned my lesson and adjusted strategies.

To be fair, the books that have benefited me the most have been ones that are more akin to hornbooks than actual outlines. Here are a few that helped me out this time around:

• Examples and Explanations: Contracts
  
• Glannon Guide to Civil Procedure
• Glannon Guide to Criminal Law
• Understanding Criminal Law
  

While these books aren't purely outlines (somewhere in between a hornbook and an outline), they are superb helps for making sense of my casebooks. I'd highly recommend them to anyone.

I've also found the High Court Case Summaries series to be tremendously helpful -- they provide a summary of the cases in your casebook that greatly help 1) for you to identify the important principles from the cases you're reading and 2) provide a great summary of the cases in an easy to review format when it comes exam time. This semester, I used them for Criminal Law and Civil Procedure. They even include a cartoon of each case to make them easier to remember.

I'd recommend any and all law students struggling with their material to avail themselves of whatever resources will help them to learn. It doesn't make sense to me that some professors do otherwise.

Law school has to be the only discipline I've studied where professors actively shoo students away from material that could be helpful for them to learn. This continues to baffle me...