2L/3Ls--a little help please Forum

[goosey]

I'm doing my reading for the first week and as you can imagine its mostly intros to the casebooks. My question is this: should I be taking notes (like, proper notes) on this intro stuff or just reading it through in a general manner.

This may seem like a stupid question, but it has me confused. In undergrad, the intro was just garbage stuff you don't need to know. My crim casebook has all kinds of jury instructions for the burden of proof--do I need to actually know these?

Do outlines have an intro?

[ak362]

Depends on the professor, but my gut instinct would say yes. You probably won't get tested on burdens of proof (unless you have some off-kilter Crim prof), but it's fair game for a Socratic professor to grill someone on it (as my crim prof did the first day). In other words, do what works best for you -- if you can retain the info by just reading it, then do so -- otherwise, a couple of notes may be worthwhile.

EDIT: Disclosure -- I'm a 2L (... wait, really? Has time flown by that quickly?).

[solidsnake]

I'm doing my reading for the first week and as you can imagine its mostly intros to the casebooks. My question is this: should I be taking notes (like, proper notes) on this intro stuff or just reading it through in a general manner.

This may seem like a stupid question, but it has me confused. In undergrad, the intro was just garbage stuff you don't need to know. My crim casebook has all kinds of jury instructions for the burden of proof--do I need to actually know these?

Do outlines have an intro?

No. the point is to understand that criminal prosecutors are charged with a higher burden of proof as to each element than that of civil litigants. As a pedagogical tool, jury instructions are more important means in torts classes to test whether students have a technical grasp of the fine points of the BLL; I've never heard of them being tested in substantive crim law classes. HTH.