The Course Outline: What It Is and When to Do It

The outline is your personal rule book for a particular course with a particular professor. It’s a compilation and synthesis of the legal principles, rules, case summaries, policy arguments, and examples that summarizes and explains the course material. It’s your rendition of “Torts with Professor Jones.” There won’t be another exactly like it. There can’t be — not even from another student in Professor Jones’ Torts class. While it might come close, the differences in organization, emphasis, and content would be significant. That’s because the outline reflects how you thought about the material.

The outline is where you make sense of the individual concepts and figure out the relationships between them. That’s why to be of any practical use, you’ve got to be the one to put it together. This is one of the few occasions where home-made is not only better, but absolutely necessary. While commercial outlines provide the rules of law and cases and examples, they do so in a generic, one-size-fits-all kind of way that doesn’t necessarily comport with how your professor taught the class. While not incorrect, they fail to capture the nuances and emphases made in class. As a result, they lack an essential ingredient for success on law school exams — the professor’s voice in interpreting the rules and showing how the issues present.

Its purpose

The course outline serves a two-fold purpose: first, it facilitates your learning of the law because it requires that you organize and record the information for memory retrieval and understanding; and, second, it prepares you for the exam because it’s where you work your way through analysis of the relevant issues you’re likely to find there.

How you perform on the exam begins here with how you learn the rules. The process of outlining facilitates learning because it requires that you organize the material in a meaningful way that allows you to remember it. In fact, a disorganized exam answer is usually the direct result of a disorganized outline. This makes perfect sense. What you write on the exam comes from what you studied; if your study materials are incorrect, incomplete, or disorganized, it will be reflected in what you write. And your grade reflects them both!

Memorization of the law is only the first step. When you memorize information, it’s good for descriptive purposes but you need to do more than just recite the rules to solve problems. You need to know how the rules work. For that, you need to see the big picture. In reading cases and in discussing them in class, you focus on very narrow and specific pieces of information. You look at rules or elements or factors and how courts apply them in different factual settings. Outlining is where you take all the individual pieces and put them together in a way that defines the relationships between them. Your professor or upper class students may have told you during the semester that “it all comes together in the end.” It does and it doesn’t: it comes together for those who put it together.

The process of “putting it together” combines two quite disparate acts: it requires that you take apart the individual rules and then connect them in a way that reflects how they interact as a whole. For an outline to “work,” it must do both. It’s not enough to deconstruct the rules into their component parts. While this is essential to learning the individual rules, you still need to know how the rules work together in order to use them.

When To Outline

You should begin your outline early in the semester and have it complete by the time you sit down to study for final exams. Unfortunately, there’s a tendency to avoid outlining until the very end of the semester and then race through the process. As a result, one of the primary benefits of outlining — learning over time — is lost.

On the other hand, you don’t want to start outlining too soon. Ideally, you should begin outlining when you’ve completed a topic and then add to it, topic by topic, as you proceed through the semester. As a general rule, I recommend sitting down between the third and fourth week of class to begin the process. By this time, you’ve covered enough material in your readings and class lectures for outlining to be productive.