Law School Companion

Law schools have their own exam structures, traditions, customs and even lingo or jargon. Lingo is a characteristic language of a particular group. Here are the lists of lingos used in law school.

• 1L, 2L and 3L – 1L, 2L and 3L refer to the first-year, second-year and third-year law student, respectively.
• IRAC – It is an acronym for Issue, Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion. It means how you should format your exam answer; once you spot the issue or issues, just follow the IRAC method.
• Socratic Methods – It is a type of questioning during which professors ask a question after question, seeking to expose incongruities in the students’ ideas and thoughts to guide them to arrive at a rational and solid conclusion.
• Blue Book – A blue cover book that contains all the rules and regulations you need to know regarding citation of statues, cases, and other legal materials when writing legal documents.
• Black Letter Law – It is a term used to describe basic principles of law, which is accepted by a majority of judges in most states and are free from any dispute or doubt.
• Hornbook – It is a collection of black letter law in one volume.
• Case Book – It is a law school textbook, which includes cases in order to illustrate the evolution or/and application of black letter law.
• Law Review – Law review is a student-run journal that publishes articles written by law judges, professors, and other legal professionals.
• Case Brief – It means the summary of a case, which includes the facts, holding, rule of law, issue at hand and rationale.
• Canned Brief – It is the commercial version of case brief.
• Moot Court – It is an extracurricular activity at many schools in which students participate in the preparation and arguing of cases in front of judges.
• Forest for the Trees - It refers to the fact that as you learn morsels of law from a whole lot of cases, you must not lose sight of the larger body of law into which they fit. In fact, this is your entire challenge as you face final exams.
• IP – IP is an abbreviation for Intellectual Property, which includes patent law, trademarks and copyrights.
• WESTLAW/LEXIS – They are the online research tools for legal and law related materials and services.
• Restatements – Sanitizations of the law written by legal intellectuals and is published by the American Law Institute, which is intended to show trends, help clarify, and even suggest future rules of law.
• Supplement – It is a study aid that helps to illustrate black letter law.
• Outline – Outline is a self-prepared summary of an entire course, which is written within 20 – 40 pages.
• Tort – This is the 1L course that covers concepts like medical malpractice, product liability and negligence.