Legal Commentary

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. 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.