About three or four weeks after classes start, you should begin the outlining process. It is essential to start early. If you wait until the week prior to an exam, you won’t have enough time to create a useful outline.
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The first step is to write a one- or two-page “source outline.” The source outline serves two purposes. First, it helps you organize the topics and subtopics before you start writing. Second, it serves as a guide to writing your master outline.
Once you have added all the topics in an order you feel comfortable with, assemble your sources. If your notebooks are not paginated, number the pages at this point. Then, under each topic, write a short citation to the page in each source where that topic is discussed.
Once you have noted in your source outline where all the information you wish to incorporate into your master outline is located, the hard work is over.
Now, you simply read the material in your three sources, consolidate it into a single factual context and a single rule of law, and write that down in your master outline.
You’ll find that in order to include all the requisite information, your outline will often contain very small categories and subtopics. This is especially true in classes such as contracts and constitutional law, in which there is a great deal of law to learn. For these sub-subtopics, you’ll probably wish to give up on formal outline procedure and just use bullets or dashes to mark the points..
Some Nuts And Bolts of Outlining
Write your outline on legal-size lined paper. The longer size is preferable because it reduces ultimate page length. Don’t use a spiral notebook; you’ll have to insert material from time to time. To keep the pages together, use rubber bands or a large clamp.
It may be helpful to write a one- or two-page table of contents for your outline. This not only gives you a helpful guide as to what your outline contains, but—if you fill it in every time you write a portion of the outline—it is valuable as an indicator of what you have outlined so far and what remains to be done.
Once you have transferred the information from your notebooks and case briefs into the master outline, place a checkmark next to or draw a line through that material where it appears in the notebooks and briefs. The purpose of doing this is so that you will be able to thumb through the original sources quickly and see if there is anything you have neglected to put in your outline.
For security’s sake, always make a copy of the outline when you have finished a section. Keep this copy in a location separate from the original. The amount of time and effort you put into your outline (and the fact that it will be the sole document used for exam studying) makes keeping an extra copy very important.
If you are ambitious you may wish for completeness’s sake to key the rule in your outline to the source material in your notebooks and briefs. This involves making simple notations in the margins of the outline next to each rule, indicating from which source you have extracted the information that appears in your master outline. The purpose of doing this is to verify the accuracy of the material if you run into a conflict later with, say, a fellow student’s conception of the rule.
You should update your master outline every three weeks or so. If you wait much longer than a month, the task becomes overly burdensome.
When you have completed a section of the outline, you might want to schematize the area of law with which that portion of the outline deals. A legal schematic is nothing more than a line diagram indicating the movement of legal activity, usually chronologically, or showing the relationship of one legal rule to another.
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These diagrams are extremely helpful in assisting you to understand particularly complicated areas of the law.
- Find some source that contains all topic headings in the area of law you have studied for the course (a casebook or hornbook table of contents, for instance). From this and your own thoughts, write a source outline that contains topics and subtopics down to the lowercase letters. Leave plenty of space after each heading.
- Paginate all your spiral notebooks. Go through each one separately, and mark in the space you have left under each heading on your source outline the page number of that source on which a discussion of the subject is found. Use very short notations; for instance, use “N3” to indicate that page 3 of your notes contains a discussion of the relevant subject. Go through the rest of your source notebooks and do the same.
- Using this source outline as a guide, go back to the be-ginning, and begin writing your outline on loose, legal-size sheets. Refer to each topic, look up the pages noted on the source outline, synthesize a rule, and write that in your outline. Include a short statement about what fact situations the issue normally arises in. Write a narrative text but use standard abbreviations.
- When you have formulated the rule and written it in your outline, mark through the portions of your original source materials to allow you to verify later that you haven’t left out anything and to avoid duplication.
- When finished with the material you have covered to date, add the topics to your table of contents and put the outline aside. Don’t study it at this point.
- You might want to do a legal schematic that shows the relationships between rules or the chronological progression of the legal activity under study.
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