Several students have come into our offices in the past couple of weeks, and expressed concerns about either being behind with outlines or wanting to know where to begin. Luckily, spring break is just around the corner, and can be a great time to catch up on your classes - and your outlines.
Your outlines are a great place to adequately make sense of the concepts from your respective classes and figure out the relationships between these concepts. It is important to know how to outline, as well as understand what your outline should include. The purpose of your outline is two-fold:
1. Your outline is a vehicle for you to learn the law because it requires you to organize and record the information for your understanding and retrieval. In doing this, you must take apart the individual rules and connect them in a way that reflects how the rules interact as a whole - it is not enough to know the individual rule, but you must also know how the rules work together.
2. It helps you prepare for exams because while writing your outline you have worked through the analysis of issues you are likely to find on your exam. Your outline will contain all you need to know when studying for exams, and in the way you need to know it.
Where do you start?
There are many places to begin - your syllabus will provide a sequence and structure for your outline; likewise, the table of contents in your casebook will help you by dividing topics. These can both be places to start in determining how to sequence your outlines, and what topics need to be covered.
How do you format an outline?
We suggest a regular outline format with a bullet or numerical scheme - it doesn't matter which format you decide; the point is that you will want to rank concepts, and identify main topics and subtopics. Usually, there is a logical sequence to follow in analysing a problem based on the construction of the rule, and this hierarchy should be worked out in your outline (again, your syllabus or the table of contents from your textbook are great places to see the hierarchy; hornbooks may help with subheadings, too).
The real work of outlining comes from synthesizing the material so that you can differentiate between the main topics and the subtopics; and do not be afraid to go outside your casebook and notes for help - hornbooks are a great resource for explaining material.
Once you have your main topics and subtopics, then you can begin to fill in the pieces to provide substance and meaning by filling in the outline with definitions, cases and examples.
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