Law Commons^™

Legal Reading And Law School Success: An Empirical Study, Leah M. Christensen

Leah M Christensen

Abstract: Does the way in which law students read legal text impact their success? This article describes important new research on how law students read cases. This study examined the way in which first year law students in the top and bottom 50% of their class read a judicial opinion and whether their use of particular reading strategies impacted their law school grades. The results were significant: even when students had gone through the same first-semester classes, the more successful law students read a judicial opinion differently than those students who were less successful. In addition, there was a correlation …