4 Steps to Creating a Useful Outline in Law School

Every law student knows that a course outline is an absolute necessity in law school. But not every law student knows how to make a course outline that will actually help them prepare for final exams. Try following these four simple steps to create a useful course outline.

Step 1: Identify Topics

The first step in the outlining process is to identify the main concepts and sub-concepts that you’ve covered in class. If you’ve done your reading and paid attention in class, most of the concepts should jump out at you pretty quickly. If you’re struggling to come up with a comprehensive list, look back at your syllabus and your casebook’s table of contents. These resources are usually a good starting point for identifying the main topics that need to be included in your outline. Ultimately, your outline is going to be organized around these legal concepts and their corresponding rules, not the cases. So, for example, if you were going to work on the section of your Torts outline that covers intentional torts, your list of concepts may include some of the following:

• Assault
• Intentional Torts
• Battery
• Consent
• Substantial Certainty
• Necessity
• Intent
• False Imprisonment
• Transferred Intent
• Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress
• Defenses
• Foreseeability

This list isn’t comprehensive or tailored to your specific class, but it should start to give you an idea of what concepts will need to be included in your outline.

Step 2: Organize Topics into the Proper Hierarchy

Once you’ve identified the topics that need to be in your outline, you need to put those topics into the proper order. Essentially, you will want to group related concepts together and display them in a hierarchy from broadest to narrowest. A good outline will be organized in a way that makes it easy to understand how the topics relate to one another and easy to see the order in which you should address them in a potential exam problem. So, with our Torts example, placing the topics we’ve identified into the proper hierarchy will make the outline look something like this:

• Intentional Torts
  • Intent
    • Substantial Certainty
    • Transferred Intent
  • Types of Intentional Torts
    • Battery
    • Assault
    • False Imprisonment
    • Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress
  • Defenses
    •  Consent
    • Necessity

Again, refer to your syllabus or casebook table of contents if you’re struggling to see the big picture. The table of contents in particular will usually give you an example of a logical and useful way to organize the concepts.

Step 3: Insert the Legal Rules

Once you have an understanding of the basic structure of your outline, you should start inserting rule statements. Rule statements are basically explanations of the black letter law that you’ve pulled from a case or synthesized from a series of cases. Your rule statements should be written so that you can recite them on an exam and apply them to future fact patterns. It is extremely important that your outline include accurate, precise, complete rule statements. The rules are what create issues amongst the facts and direct you in how to proceed in your analysis. If you don’t have correct, comprehensive rule statements in your outline (your main study tool) you may miss issues in a fact pattern or get off track in your analysis. Using the section on battery, the Torts outline will look something along these lines once the rule statements are included.

• B. Battery = An actor is subject to liability for battery if he acts intending to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the person of another and a harmful or offensive contact occurs.
  • Intent element – Desire to touch or act with substantial certainty that a touching will occur.
  • Harmful/Offensive Touch Element – Offensiveness of contact judged by an objective standard of whether reasonable person would be offended by contact.
  • Person of another element – touching must happen to another person or something closely connected to the person’s body.

Be careful if you’re pulling rule statements from a supplement or commercial outline. Your rule statements should always be tailored to the way your specific professor taught the law.

Step 4: Fill in the Details

The final step in the outlining process is to fill in the outline with the nuances, exceptions, and policy your professor focused on in class. Professors (not to mention bar examiners) love to test the nuances of a rule, so it’s important to include all the details. This is also your opportunity to insert examples from cases and hypos. You don’t want to include mini-case briefs in your outline, but you should try to include some very brief examples from the cases. These examples show you how the legal rules are applied in actual scenarios. While the example below won’t include everything you need to know for battery, it will give you an idea of what your outline should start to look like by the time you’ve completed step 4:

• Battery = An actor is subject to liability for battery if he acts intending to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the person of another and a harmful or offensive contact occurs.
  • Intent element – Desire to touch or act with substantial certainty that a touching will occur.
    • Ex. Garrett v. Dailey – although he may not have wanted to injure, boy could have been substantially certain that injury would occur when he pulled chair from underneath woman.
  • Harmful/Offensive Touch Element – Offensiveness of contact judged by an objective standard of whether reasonable person would be offended by contact.
    • May be satisfied by relatively trivial contact with another person if done in anger and/or if it would be offensive to a reasonable sense of dignity.
    • Ex. Snyder v. Turk – Dr. pulling nurse’s face towards him in anger.
  • Person of another element – touching must happen to another person or something closely connected to the person’s body.
    • Includes clothing or objects held in hand, etc.
    • Ex. Fisher case – dispossessing dinner plate in hands of Plaintiff

Once your outline is complete, take it for a test drive by using it to answer some practice problems. Your outline is supposed to help you on exams, so if it’s not serving this purpose, don’t hesitate to edit and revise it. If you follow these four steps, you should end up with a comprehensive, logical outline that will help you write a comprehensive, logical exam answer.

For more help with outlining, check out these posts:

• How to Turn Your Class Notes Into An Outline
• Taking Your Law School Outlines Beyond Legal Trivia
• Law School Outlining: Can Your Outlines Be Too Long?