Law School Tips
Granville, J.-J. (1867) wood engraving, Vie privée et publique des animaux, Paris: Hetzel.
Recently, I was invited to speak on legal skills before students who would soon embark on their bachelor of laws programme.
Here are some simple points for new students undertaking their first law degree in Malaysia. I share these points based on my own observations of the legal studies and professional landscape (though not being an academician myself). I also have included a number of points based on my own mistakes so that you can identify and avoid them.
Understand what is expected of you from the syllabus for a particular subject in a particular semester. Do not coast passively through the semester with the hope of “getting by”. These expectations will give you an idea of what you are able to do or to answer or to draft. The first lecture and course outlines should be adequate guidance, together with scripts of past exams. In my law school, a section of the library keeps past exam papers for the past three decades in hardcopy and remain mostly relevant despite the shift of score weightage from 60/40 to 50/50 in the last decade.
Write strongly and speak clearly in English and BM. If you are big on Islamic law, then you should be strong in Arabic too. As a non-academic, I observe poor communication skills plague many (but not all) undergraduates and graduates. Someone with inferior merit but better communication skills can even edge you out in life. This is fact so deal with it. Focus on writing and speaking with clarity so that other people can understand and make sense of your message. Shift from thinking that writing and speaking is about expressing what you know : You need to change that so that writing and speaking is about ensuring your audience (including your examiner) understands you. You can lose your case and underperform your exam only because you are a bad writer. The first step is, your mind must be clear and strong, your mind must be clear with what it wants and what is important. Clear your mind of distractions — focus and be clear, and your writing and speech will be clear too.
Constant awareness and initiative of your surroundings. I repeat, do not coast passively throughout your student life. Be aware of what is happening to your class, your faculty and on campus — all resources, activities, talks. There are often student support which can help you save effort or to put you ahead.
Sift in and out of multiple social circles within and outside your faculty, and among seniors too. Much unwritten rules and tricks of the trade in student life are often passed through such networks — be wary of bad habits from seniors though. Since you are an adult, have your own mind about things so use such networks wisely to benefit you and not to burden you. Important news or trends are often broadcast through informal networks and could help you if you missed hearing it firsthand. At the same time, banish any thoughts that it is cooler to hang out within the orbit of any particular social circle, for example one type of student movement only or an NGO outside campus because you think you are too cool for clubs inside campus. Keep an open mind and mix around — again you may not have a similar opportunity again for the rest of your life. If you are based in a campus with a large population of international students, please take the opportunity to make friends.
No shortcuts when reading the law and please think when you read, do not merely memorise. Law is a thinking subject, but I know there are law schools that will tolerate pure memorisers and permit straight As. If you are a good memoriser (this is different from having a good memory), then for undergraduate level, you have won half the battle at 50%. Furthermore, I believe that at undergraduate level, it is enough for you to follow the course outline. Read all the reported cases listed therein. Do not rely on notes from seniors or summaries of cases. I fell into that habit and learned its pitfalls the hard way. Do not be lazy — go beyond the headnotes and read each case entirely. You must know what is ratio and what is obiter and what is hyperbole. When you read the law, as you attempt to commit the ratio and facts to memory, you must think them through. Think of the reasoning. Test your understanding with tutors and lecturers, not with friends or study groups, sometimes your peers can mislead you due to their imperfect understanding. Again, do not merely memorise; you must think— do not be an imposter in the law school.
Precision. This is the most difficult point for me to get across. Precision means, you need to start to think like a lawyer. A good lawyer is precise, not vague, ambivalent or wishy-washy. You need to develop a habit of being precise and to the point in the things you read and the things you write. It is different from my point on clarity above. For example, there is a concise way to describe mens rea and acts reus. If you are unable to describe such concepts concisely and precisely, it means that you do not know what you are talking about. Be careful of unknowingly misconstruing concepts that are deceptively simple on the surface. Being precise, cut-and-dry will help keep you on the right path. Precision may be challenging in loaded, sometimes wordy subjects such as Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence. A shortcut that is inadequate but could save you sometimes, is to just memorise exactly what the judge said including the reasoning, because the Judge’s brain has already done the work for you. However as I said, that is inadequate and eventually you will need to be able to articulate the concepts on the facts of an exam problem.
Use mnemonic techniques and mind-mapping to aid you for exams. This goes without saying in all exam-oriented formats. Suppose you studied late nights yet you forgot a particular case, do not despair and do not belabour such tragedy. Just write, “In a reported case decided by the High Court”. At least the examiner would know that you knew such concept existed. I think I referred to the famous Hanif Basree case as “in a well-known case defended by Sithambaram…” because I remembered my lecturer said in class that “he raised 8 points in his submission of no case to answer”. We were impressed of course because 8 was such an enormous a number.
Make the most of your lecturers. Some of us may never have such opportunity for the rest of our professional lives. Understand that lecturers present broad, high-level concepts as a guide — you are expected to pursue them as leads and to mine (BM: lombong) the course outline voraciously. Do not depend on the lecturer’s notes! Following the lecturer’s notes 100% will not give you an A grade, and once in a while if you are unlucky you will get unhelpful or vague notes or even no notes. They are a guide and starting point only. Lecturers are often Professors and senior lecturers, they are eminent, knowledgable persons in their field. They are not there to teach you. You are before them as a privilege to obtain pearls of knowledge from them. They could be authors or somebodies without you realising it. Get to know them and their work and keep in touch with them after you have completed the semester — some of them can become lifelong colleagues.
Prepare fully and be at your best for tutorials. Tutorials are not “tuition classes”. They are sessions where smaller groups of students can interact directly with the tutor; to challenge and test their understanding and ideas derived from their own reading. I emphasise, own reading. You need to put in the time yourself. Tutorial is not a time to come with your understanding of the mass lecture only. Tutors are often lecturers but sometimes they are part-time lecturers who are practicing lawyers, prosecutors, magistrates and sometimes professors. Take full advantage of such direct interaction to test your mastery of the subject and to also know a bit about what they do outside university (the lawyers etc.). Again I emphasise that you test your mastery of the subject at tutorial, you do not master the subject in tutorial or in class. Your so called “mastery” (I am using my terminology for context) can only be earned after hard hours alone with the reported cases. Which leads to my next and most important point below :—
Put time into the Law. There is no other way to do this except by spending time alone, away from distractions, and reading the reported cases. Go to the library and write your notes by hand. Photocopy and scan and highlight them. The actual reported judgments is the way proper lawyers do it and it is the way you will do it too. Glanville Williams wrote in Learning the Law (11th Ed, pp 52) :
“Some teachers of law do not recommend the use of case books. In their view, the only way to become a proficient lawyer is to sit down in the library and read cases, not contenting oneself with the headnote or any other simplified version of the case, but reading through the whole of the statement of facts and the whole of the judgments.”
You do not have to read every single decision referred or distinguished; focus first on whatever was listed in the course outline. When you have read many judgments, you will acquire the typical language used and they will come out instinctively, automatically in your answer scripts.
Time management. This heading is self-explanatory. I just wish to add that you should ruthlessly be selective of your social and extra-curricular commitments, but you shall be the judge of that. Everyone has a part of the day that they are most efficient at work and their mind sharpest. You may be a morning person, a very early morning person, a night person. Some people can only get going when they are in the right mood. Sometimes the mood will never arrive, so you need to know your own preferences and stick to a plan as best as you can.