Cases & Outlining: The Basics

This lesson will take you step-by-step through a method of representing the content from cases in an outline. The lesson is generally designed for students in their first semester of law school; however, pre-1L students may derive benefit as well. Practice questions use basic doctrines from first-year Contracts, Civil Procedure, Torts, and Criminal Law to give students practice with skill transfer.

Learning Outcomes

On completion of the lesson, the student will be able to:

1. Construct outlines by topic and subtopic.
2. Compose basic case explanations for course outlines, including (a) framing narrow and broad legal conclusions, and (b) incorporating relevant facts.
3. Integrate case explanations into an outline according to topic and subtopic.