Supplements...good or bad?

Q: I am so slow at reading!! I'm reading about 5 pages in one hour. I hear that's normal but I'm hoping I get quicker soon. I'm going to try reading the supplements before I start a case, as Pablo suggested, and see if that helps . . . Although I always hear from professors not to use supplements. Why do they say that?

Javier's Response:

The supplements thing is a personal thing i think. There are many many things that you need to learn your first year (and especially the first semester). Two of those things/skills are:

- knowledge of what the law/important stuff is, so that you can use that knowledge to get an A on your final exam
- the ability to be able to read a case/judicial opinion and figure out what the important facts, holding, reasoning, etc are

The ability to read the cases and pull out the important stuff is a very important skill. That's what lawyers do. They find the cases which deal with the issue they need to argue. The lawyer then reads those cases and figures out how those cases affect the issue he/she needs to argue. That is also what you'll need to do on your final exams. You'll likely be presented with a case (or a description of a set of facts) and have to argue. That skill (being able to read and figure out what the case/facts are about) is extremely important both in the long run and on your finals. And the only way to learn to do that is to immediately start reading your casebooks and try to figure out what the cases mean and which facts are important. If you don't learn how to do that now, you won't be able to magically do it on your final exam. It's really really really hard at first and it ALWAYS seems like you're reading the case incorrectly or thinking that the wrong things are important. But, like most things in life, it's a slow learning process and you need to take it little by little.

That being said, supplements can definitely be helpful when you're trying to learn what the law on a given topic is. And on your finals, you'll definitely need to know what the law is, because you'll need to apply that law to the facts you're given. Howeve, please note that knowing what the law is is very different from the skill I described above. That's the difficult thing about supplements. In the short run they can help you make sure you understand what the law is and help demystify everything. However, if you just use the supplements in place of reading the cases, you won't develop that skill on your own, and you'll be lost on the final.

So, like most things in law school (and in life) it's about finding a balance. Use supplements to help you understand what the law is, but make sure that you don't allow them to short-circuit that long (and difficult) learning process of reading cases and figuring out what's important.

I personally always read a case first and figured out what it meant, went to class and got proven completely wrong, then used the supplements to help me figure out what i got wrong. I feel that it worked for me, but this is a very personal thing, and it's a matter of trial and error to figure out what works best for you. The important thing is to start EARLY so you don't finally figure out what works best for you two days before the final.