The skills required for success as a law student

Law students require a variety of aptitudes and, to use a more specifically practical word, skills. Reduced to their most basic, what is required is an aptitude for hard work coupled with an analytical mind which enjoys the challenge of expressing difficult ideas clearly.

A useful approach to effective reading and note taking is the SQ3R technique, the stages of which are:

survey;

question;

read;

recall (or recite);

review.

The aim of the SQ3R technique, which was first promoted by the American psychologist Francis Robinson in 1941, is to help you read purposefully in order to create a mental framework of the topic as you read. We will discuss the techniques of researching, planning and answering both essay and problem questions in Chapters 10 and 11. For the moment, however, we shall confine ourselves to showing how the SQ3R technique can help you to study a topic simply in order to understand it, rather than to research, plan and write a piece of written work.

To begin your consideration of a chapter in a book or an article in a law journal, for example, you will survey the whole piece by skimming through the pages, paying particular attention to any introductory summary and conclusion, as well as to the headings and subheadings which break up the text. Having understood the structure of the piece as a whole, you will then question what value it has for you, by asking whether it reinforces, extends or contradicts your existing knowledge of the topic. Assuming that you wish to proceed further with the piece, you will then read it properly, making appropriate notes. If you find yourself copying out any passages word-for-word, be careful to use quotation marks round the relevant passages and to note their precise location. If, at some later stage, you wish to incorporate these passages into pieces of written work, you will then have no difficulty in citing your source accurately, in order to avoid laying yourself open to an allegation of plagiarism. (Plagiarism, which is a form of cheating, is discussed at pp. 182–185 and 188.)

At this stage, and by way of a slight digression from the SQ3R technique itself, it may be worth saying that your notes will become a very personal part of your resources. Some people rely simply on a careful structure of headings and subheadings, while others use graphics (such as boxes, circles, different colours and connecting arrows) to create emphasis, illustrate links and raise questions. There are only three really important things to bear in mind:

You must be able to understand your notes easily when you come to re-read them.

They must be structured in such a way that they help you to generate a mental map of the topic.

Do not take the easy option of simply highlighting or underlining what you see as the key sections of a text, rather than making notes from them, because:

– note-taking is an important skill which you may well need in the future (for example, when attending meetings or when taking instructions from clients); and it can be acquired and developed only through practice;

– the act of note-taking makes you decide for yourself how the main points of the material can best be summarised.

– your notes will be an important resource when you come to write coursework essays and revise for examinations. In the context of coursework, as we shall see at p. 188, working from notes is a very helpful way of avoiding plagiarism (or cheating), while in the context of examinations, almost everyone finds they can revise most effectively from materials which are in their own handwriting rather than from the printed page (whether or not it is enhanced by highlighting or underlining).

Returning specifically to the SQ3R technique, the recall stage is a way of embedding in your mind what you have read. If you are reading a particularly complex chapter or article, you might find it helpful to read just part of the text, take a short break, and then test your ability to recall the basic concepts, arguments or core facts of the material you have just read. For a less complex text, you might do the recall stage a day or two later. Recall should be done without looking at the notes you made during the reading stage. One way to consolidate your thoughts is to write a summary of the material while you are recalling it; or alternatively you could create a diagram such as a flow chart or algorithm, or simply recite what you know out loud. The method you choose will very much depend on your learning style and temperament. The key thing is to use a method that helps you to instil in your mind what you have read, while also developing your understanding of the material.

Finally, you will review what you have been reading, in order to reinforce your understanding and to check that you have not missed anything of importance. The review can take place at anytime after the recall stage. In most cases (as with the recall stage itself) the time when you review your material will depend on how difficult you found the reading. Simple material can be quickly noted and then reviewed days later.

Organising yourself to read in this way can take a great deal of self-discipline, but the SQ3R technique remains a popular method of effective reading. While you may find the system laborious at first, it has the advantage of helping you read actively, questioningly and effectively. The pressures of academic life are such that you can never read everything in detail. Learning to read purposefully now will be hard work, but it will save you a great deal of time and effort later on.

It is important to emphasise the need for hard work as an essential part of studying law, because far too many students are tempted to think that they can succeed by relying on what they imagine to be their natural ability, without bothering to add the expenditure of effort. To take an analogy, some people prefer the more or less instant gratification which comes from watching a television adaptation of a classic novel to the rather more laborious process of reading the novel itself. Those who prefer watching television to reading the book are less likely to study law successfully, unless they rapidly acquire a taste for text-based materials.

It is also important to emphasise that studying law is a cumulative process. This means that you must absorb, understand and retain at least the main principles of every subject that you study, so that you will be able to apply them to other subjects later on. For example, you will need a sound grasp of foundation subjects such as contract law and administrative law before you can progress successfully to subjects such as employment law and environmental law.

Incidentally, it is often said that lawyers neither know nor need to know any more law than other people, but that they simply need to know where to look it up. While it is, of course, true that many lawyers do frequently look things up, there are various reasons why it is quite simply untrue to say that they neither know nor need to know any more law than other people do.

The first point is that, in common with members of other learned professions, lawyers are expected to know a lot of material. There are several reasons why this is so.

First, as a matter of psychology, clients are unlikely to have much confidence in lawyers who plainly know no law.

Secondly, lawyers who have to spend time on getting themselves onto an equal footing with their more knowledgeable competitors before they can start spending time on the key task of giving advice or providing other professional services, will have to charge more than their competitors charge. It follows that lawyers who do not know the law will be at a commercial disadvantage against competitors who do know a lot of law, since those who know the least will have to charge the most.

Thirdly, having found the law, you need to be able to understand it. This requires both a good grasp of that area of law known as legal method (so that you can understand and apply the sources you have looked up), and a wider knowledge of the law relating to various topics. After all, there is no point in looking up a legal rule which seems to dispose of your case if you are unaware of another and more authoritative rule which will prevail. An example may help.

Suppose your client’s widowed mother has died without leaving a will, and that your client is her only child. If you simply look up the Act of Parliament dealing with inheritance of property in situations where there is no will, you will conclude that your client is entitled to inherit the whole of his or her mother’s estate. However, suppose that your client killed his or her mother. This may have been by murder or manslaughter, or, perhaps more probably, by being the driver of a car in which the mother was a passenger and which was involved in an accident for which your client was responsible and as a result of which the mother died.

The Act of Parliament which lays down the rules of succession where there is no will makes no mention of the fact that those rules are subject to an additional set of rules which seek to prevent people benefiting from their own wrongdoing.

Fourthly, there will be many occasions in professional practice when it is simply impossible to look up the law, and lawyers must, therefore, rely on their legal knowledge. For example, they may be in a meeting with clients, or appearing as advocates in court, when only a few textbooks may be available, and pressure of time may mean that even these can be used only to jog the memory, rather than as sources on which to base research.

Quite apart from a capacity for hard work, law students require good linguistic and analytical skills. Although these may sound like, and in some cases will indeed be, two distinct skills, in practical terms they often merge into one. For example, take an Act of Parliament which, among other things, prohibits the possession of obscene articles for publication for gain, except where publication is

justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern.

Clearly this exception would apply to the depiction of nudity in classical art and to the publication of photographs of human genitals in medical textbooks. But what about cases involving articles which are plainly obscene on any sensible meaning of the word? Can the defence argue that such articles are nevertheless lawful because they help some people to release their frustrations through sexual fantasies (with a consequent reduction in the number of sexual offences) and that this is plainly an object of general concern?

A linguistically perceptive response to this question would proceed on the following lines. If the exception applies to any ‘objects of general concern’, why did Parliament specify the preceding categories (namely ‘science, literature, art or learning’)? Is it not reasonable, therefore, to interpret the words ‘other objects of general concern’ as being limited to other things of the same kind as those which are specified? Thus the argument for the defence does not justify the application of the exception.

Furthermore, and quite apart from purely linguistic considerations, when the content of the argument for the defence is analysed, it becomes plain that what is really being claimed is that the availability of obscene articles can be justified simply on the ground that they are obscene. It is difficult to see how anyone could reasonably regard this as a credible interpretation of an Act of Parliament which was passed in order to subject obscene articles to very strict controls.

As a final point on the need for good language skills, it may be useful to consider a classic legal anecdote. The story is told of a judge who, having listened patiently to an advocate who was making a long and learned submission, said: ‘Well, Mr Smith, having listened to all you have had to say, I must confess that I am none the wiser’. ‘Perhaps not, my Lord’, replied the advocate, ‘but at least your Lordship is better informed’. Whether or not you find this funny may be a good indicator of whether you are sufficiently sensitive to nuances of meaning to be likely to succeed as a law student.