Anyone have a good Chemerinsky Con Law I outline? Forum

[chrisbru]

I have a brand new professor, and she uses Chemerinsky - Which none of the other Con Law I professors before her have used - So old outlines are basically useless. We covered through Dormant Commerce Clause. It would be much appreciated!

[TTH]

Is your exam going to be in-class or take-home? If it's take home, I actually wouldn't recommend doing an outline. Every class/prof is different, to be sure, but an outline absolutely would not have been conducive to analyzing the questions on my Con Law exam. I didn't do one, got an A, and it was the happiest moment of my 1L year.

[Sapientia]

Is your exam going to be in-class or take-home? If it's take home, I actually wouldn't recommend doing an outline. Every class/prof is different, to be sure, but an outline absolutely would not have been conducive to analyzing the questions on my Con Law exam. I didn't do one, got an A, and it was the happiest moment of my 1L year.

What did you do?

[Reds622]

Is your exam going to be in-class or take-home? If it's take home, I actually wouldn't recommend doing an outline. Every class/prof is different, to be sure, but an outline absolutely would not have been conducive to analyzing the questions on my Con Law exam. I didn't do one, got an A, and it was the happiest moment of my 1L year.

Yes I am also interested in hearing about what you did. I have a take home- Con Law exam as well.

[chrisbru]

It's in-class, open note, half weight on 30-40 multiple choice, half weight on one 1400 word limited essay.

The outline is more a study guide than for use in the test though.

[SilverE2]

I'm going to go ahead and +1 this. I'm having a really hard time trying to get my head around the big ideas in this class, the individual cases don't seem particularly difficult, but I'm not sure how to take the cases and apply them to new fact patterns and I feel like I need to see a decent outline to put it all together.

[TTH]

Is your exam going to be in-class or take-home? If it's take home, I actually wouldn't recommend doing an outline. Every class/prof is different, to be sure, but an outline absolutely would not have been conducive to analyzing the questions on my Con Law exam. I didn't do one, got an A, and it was the happiest moment of my 1L year.

Yes I am also interested in hearing about what you did. I have a take home- Con Law exam as well.

So, we had a 48-hour take home exam. I basically made a table-of-cases outline from what we covered. There was no content in it whatsoever. It basically looked something like this:

Substantive Due Process (CB 440) (Cher. - p. 100)
• Takings
• • Case 1 (CB 446, Cher. 107)
• • Case 2 (CB 460, Cher. 111)
• Abortion or Some Shit
• • Case 3 (CB 477, Cher. 115)
• • Case 4 (CB 500, Cher. 130)

CB meaning where I could find the case in the casebook, and Cher. meaning where I could find it in the Cherminsky treatise. Since I used Circus Ponies Notebook to take class notes, each day had a page and I titled the pages according to the concept and issues we were discussing that day.

So, let's say the exam featured a hypo doing something with marriage rights. Looking at the table of contents of my class notes, I pull up the page for the days we were talking about marriage rights. If my class notes had everything I felt I needed to write a good answer, then great. If not, I could probably look at my class notes and know that I need to talk about due process and equal protection, as well as whatever my prof said that I thought was important enough to write down that day. I would then go to my table of cases and find what I needed to look up in Chemerinsky. I'd read through that, and if I felt getting some specific wording from the case would be helpful, I also knew where to quickly look up the cases.

I knew going into the exam that this was going to be okay for me because I had looked through a few practice exams and I wasn't having trouble spotting issues (plus I knew the prof was going to focus on individual rights because that was the part of the class he liked talking about). If you're worried about your ability to spot issues, maybe it's worthwhile to look over your notes or something more before the exam to satisfy yourself that you'll spot the patterns.

[chrisbru]

The thing is that it's an open book, open note, multiple choice test. Outlines are helpful for that.