Preparing for Law School in two hours

[Music] get everyone and welcome to my to our law school prep course this short course is aimed at students who aspire to study law at university you may be a high school student doing legal studies at high school you might be a mature age student looking for a change you might have already received an offer to start studying law it's an exciting time a few years ago I was teaching law at a university which tended to attract mature age students returning to study after a long time in order to qualify for entry many of those students had to do a preparatory program it was intended to overcome the fact that in many cases they lacked the formal qualifications for entry what i discovered though was that my first-year students who had been through this prep course were actually doing better in many cases than the students whose backgrounds qualified them for entry without the prep course let me tell you why when you start your degree you'll likely be doing between two and four subjects per turn straight off the bat one of those would be your introduction to law or legal foundations course the others are likely to be fundamental but intense subjects but contract law criminal law or the law of torts now the introduction to war subject will be designed to teach you some skills as well as basic law but really you're left in the position where you're trying to learn the law some fundamental and complicated law at the same time as you trying to learn to be a law student that's tough so the idea of a prep course like this is that I'm not planning to teach you any law at all what I'm going to do in this course is teach you about the skills that you need in order to be a successful lawsuit now before we begin one thing does have me a little worried about this video and that's that you might listen to me talking about some of these skills and you may be discouraged because you feel you're not ready yet don't be discouraged in each case I'm going to talk about some strategies for continuing to develop those skills and there's absolutely no reason that you can't continue developing those skills as you start to study law I believe in your capacity for success I just want to help show you the way you don't want to do that in two hours let's start the clock I want to start by outlining what the contents of this video will be we're going to start by talking about structure and outline of what a law degree involves and outline of how each unit tends to look and an outline of the types of materials that you'll encounter from week to week this will give you a roadmap of what lies ahead over the next few years and some context for the skills that we're going to discuss then I want to talk about how law students are assessed and go over some strategies for handling those assessments well once we've done that I want to discuss in some depth some specific skills and learning styles which dominating the law that'll take up a good portion of the video finally we'll talk briefly about some of the extracurricular things you can do and whether they worth doing so let's begin in Australia it is unlawful to practice law unless you've been admitted to practice by one of the state supreme courts or by the High Court the first step towards admission for practice is to have an appropriate law degree there are five different types of law degree that will qualify you for practice these are a combined or double degree a graduate degree a standalone undergraduate degree what's called a Juris Doctor and in New South Wales a qualification called the Diploma in law let's briefly look at each one by one the most traditional type of law degree in Australia is the double or combined degree until the last few decades virtually all the law degrees with double degrees these take about six years full time to obtain and the student does their law degree and at the same time another degree such as The Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science or a Bachelor of accounting the idea is that the graduate who pops at the end of the process not only has a sound grasp at the law but they also have expertise in some other field students with these degrees will usually have an advantage over any student who just has a law degree the second type is a graduate degree I did one of these graduate degrees are often for students who already have a degree in some other field and who've returned to study law so these students end up in the same place as a combined degree student it's just I already have their expertise in another subject area a graduate degree usually takes three years full-time and it's longer part-time the third there are standalone law degrees these usually take four years and they're designed for students who are not bringing another degree to the party a standalone law degree is the quickest way to qualify and as a result they can be very attractive to students they just want to get it and get the degree out of the way and get stuck into the practice of law there are dangers in this sort of thinking though a student with a standalone law degree will be at a disadvantage compared to any of the other degree types that I'm going to discuss employers do tend to value law graduates with qualifications in some other field fourth there's a rather oddly named degree called the juris doctor it's called this to fall into line with American academic practices personally I hate it because it gives the impression that the student has a doctorate a higher degree when in fact they do not a juris doctor is nothing more than a graduate Bachelor of Laws which has been given a different name for advertising purposes don't be formed for a moment into thinking that a juris doctor is a higher degree a JD usually takes three years full-time or six years part-time finally the more extension committee in New South Wales offers a program called the Diploma in law it's not actually offered by a university it's offered directly by the New South Wales legal practitioners admission board it's about half the cost of an undergraduate degree less than $1,000 a subject and you only need to do twenty subjects to qualify and the requirements for entry are less than most universities once you're in though this is a rigorous study program don't let the word Diploma fool you into thinking this is a second-rate program it is one of the toughest law degrees in Australia and it's already produced one High Court judge you'll also find that different universities have quite different philosophical approaches to teaching the law there are three basic types of school the black-letter law schools focus on teaching the law as it is end of story they teach the letter of the law these schools tend to be the older more established law schools the second type of law-school is a practical law school these universities focus on teaching you the law but at the same time try to teach you the skills of being a lawyer so things like interviewing clients and courtroom advocacy these tend to be established law schools without being the Sandstone law schools with big heavy reputations finally there are the social law schools these law schools look at the law but they also look at how the law reflects communities and whether the law should be reformed these universities tend to be the newer less established law schools now among all of these there's no best philosophy it all depends on what you're looking for your degree you may want the towering reputation of an established law school and black-letter law study may suit you but you'll have less practical skills than if you went to a practical school but both of these may be wrong for you if your focus is on changing and improving the law when shopping for a law school don't be afraid to ask about their philosophical approach and see if it works for you ok your degree is then broken up into subjects or units of study each unit takes one semester or one trimester to complete most of the time full-time students will do 4 units per turn and part-time students generally two or three some universities have to teaching periods a year so two semesters with a long break over summer and some universities have three teaching periods a year so three trimesters trimesters have massive advantages because they let you move along much more quickly or alternatively they'll let you move at the usual pace but they spread the workload more evenly through the year now whichever degree you choose in order to qualify for practice you'll need to pass 11 core units of study these are known as the priestly xi named after the former judge whose report led to this development as a standard these are the 11 aspects of the law that each and every legal practitioner simply must know about if they're to practice law in Australia traditionally you'll start with the found patience subjects contract law which is about enforceable agreements between people tort law which is about compensation with when someone is wronged criminal law which is about how we deal with criminal offences and constitutional law which is about our National Constitution which underpins our whole legal system the other seven priestly subjects build on those four they are administrative law which is all about how government agencies make lawful decisions Civil Procedure which is about basic processes of litigation company law or corporations law which is about the formation and operation of companies equity and trusts which is not about gender equity or anything like that it's about a completely different area of law which developed alongside the common law hundreds of years ago property law which includes personal property but also real property which is the legal way of describing real estate evidence law which is about the use of evidence in court and finally ethics and professional practice which is all about how lawyers must act and how they must not act now in most universities those eleven subject areas will actually take up more than eleven subjects in your degree for instance it's very common to split up contracts and torts into two subjects each so in that case you'll cover the Priestly 11 in 13 subjects before we move away from the priestly 11 now is a good moment to tell you that not all law degrees teach the priestly 11 any Bachelor of Laws will do so at all say any JD degree however there are plenty of graduate certificates and master's degrees out there which specialize in an area of law so for instance you might do a master of environmental law that degree might give you a specialist knowledge in that one area of law but you won't have completed the priestly eleven and so you won't be able to become a lawyer on the strength of that degree alone it's worth double-checking before you enroll whether your degree will meet the requirements for admission to practice so you've done the priestly 11 most universities will also have a couple of other subjects we compulsory but which are not in the priestly level for instance many universities insist on a separate statutory interpretation subject which is about how to read legislation properly virtually all universities have an introduction to law or equivalent subject as a basic introductory subject to get you started the rest of your degree will be taken up with elective subjects for these you get to select from a menu offerings in much more focused areas family law international law tax law environment law and defamation law ancient Roman law the best universities have a wide wide range of different elective subjects and on top of that in some degrees particularly the better standalone degrees you may be required to do some electives from an entirely different discipline such as English or history or anything else you please again this is about producing law graduates with an exposure to areas of knowledge beyond just the law in total you can expect to complete somewhere around 24 subjects in the course of your degree once you've finished the requirements of your program you will graduate with your law degree if you do a Bachelor of Laws that carries the post-nominal letters LLB which stands for Blair Gong baccalaureus which is the Latin term for Bachelor of Laws however after completing your degree you're not yet a lawyer and you can't practice law if you want to do that you need to complete what is called practical legal training which is an additional graduate diploma combined with some work experience basically your bachelor's degree teaches you about the law practical legal training then teaches you how to be a lawyer most people can knock practical legal training over in about six months once you've done both of those you'll be ready to apply to the Supreme Court for admission as well of course many people complete a law degree without any intention of practicing the law law graduates are valuable employees in many fields because they can communicate well both verbally and in writing because they've developed the skills of rational analysis and because these days reaches deeply into so many areas of our society that one can hardly imagine any field of social endeavor where knowledge of the Lord would not be helpful bear in mind though that if you're studying one of the degrees which does prepare students for the practice of law that'll be the focus of the program the working assumption for the program will be that every student intends to practice law so to sum up thus far if you want to be eligible to practice law then you'll need to complete a Bachelor of Laws a JD or the New South Wales apply marine law the legal component will be roughly 24 to 30 subjects and overall the program will take at least three years but perhaps twice that for a combined or double degree during the degree you'll complete the priestly 11 subjects and then at the end of your degree if you want to go into practice you'll need to complete a further much shorter course of study called practical legal training now let's drill down and look at how a particular subject might look there's a little bit of danger in doing this because I don't want to give you the mistaken impression that all more subjects are conducted in exactly the same way what I'm going to try and do is give you a look at a subject upon which I'm confident is typical of many law subjects but honestly you can expect to encounter many variations on this thing especially for the more innovative teachers who are starting to try and deal with the idea that here nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st century we don't have to teach law the same way that it was taught in the 19th century so that we've got something realistic to work with I'm going to work from a dummy subject outline based on an introductory contract law subject that I used to teach a few years ago the lectures are still on my channel if you're interested as I mentioned a few moments ago universities divide their teaching year into semesters or trimesters each semester or trimester looks a little something like this first there'll be a teaching block of roughly six weeks and then there'll be a non teaching week and then another teaching block of roughly six weeks and then usually an exam preparation week known as SWAT back followed by an exam nation block after that there's a short holiday period and then the whole process starts all over again here's tip number one though the non-teaching week in the middle of the term is not at mid semester holiday many students especially those have just finished school think of it as a midterm holiday that's foolish the non teaching week is really a catch-up week if you've gotten behind and that's almost always the case then this is a great opportunity to make up some lost ground if you haven't gotten behind because you've followed all the great tips in this video then this is a good chance to steam ahead now each week will have a particular theme or element which is going to be studied let's have a look at this in the dummy contract course so week 1 we have an introduction to the course week 2 capacity to enter a contract with free intention to create legal relations week 4 offer and acceptance week 5 the consideration paid for a contract and week 6 certainty and completeness then we go off for our non teaching week we come back the following week for week 7 which is expressed terms in a contract week 8 implied terms week nine reading a contract effectively we tend the Australian Consumer Law week 11 the doctrine of privity which 12 is our revision week then we have exam prep and the examination block as I say this is pretty typical although in some trimester systems the revision week will be eliminated now this just looks like a long list of jargon terms really doesn't it first if we're clever however this list is actually ridiculously useful in a couple of ways first and foremost if the course has been designed wealth and admittedly not all of them are then these week by week topics will scaffold upon one another in other words each week builds on the last so that you gradually accumulate all of the necessary knowledge it's therefore important to study them in order even if you get left behind don't jump ahead and don't jump to the current week if you haven't done the preceding week's SEC in most subjects there's going to be a prescribed textbook now I'm going to pretend that our textbook for this course is the Oxford University Press textbook simply called contract law if we open the textbook to just the table of contents it really jumps out at us that a whole bunch of the chapters line up with the topics so week two of our course is called capacity and chapter 10 of the textbook is called capacity week three is intention then chapter 5 is intention and so forth along with the textbook there is a super useful volume called a case book which will extract the relevant bits from the most important cases which line up to the topic each week again many of the chapters will line up with our topics so right now at the start of the term we come to the most crucial moment in the whole process literally the most crucial this is where most students stuff it up you see most students run their all over this list and in the back of their mind they think okay I'll get taught about all these things along the way this turn and at the end of it I'll study hard for the exam and hopefully I'll do well there is a better way well you should be saying right there on day 1 is this in roughly three months time I'm going to have to sit in exam in which I'm going to be tested on all 12 of these topics my preparation for that exam starts today everything that I read every lecture I listen to every note I take will be taken with the express purpose of getting ready for that exam in a few minutes time we're going to talk about how we actually do this the most important thing at the moment is to get your mind set right when a lawyer researches the more they don't do it just generally learn about the law they do it with a focus the focus is that they need to write a strong statement of claim well they need to prepare strong submissions for a judge or they need to prepare a strong letter of advice the goal focuses the work your goal is to pass the exam identify that goal from day one and let goal focus the work along the way you will most likely have at least one assignment in some subjects you might will have more the assignment schedule causes people to make a second big mistake you see it's too easy to think right I have an assignment during week 7 just after the non teaching week so I'm going to spend the first half of the term working towards the assignment and the second half working towards the exam sounds logical but I promise this is not the way to do this what you need to do is say on day 1 right now I have two projects one is a seven week project to produce an assignment and one is a 12 week project to prepare for an exam it's a subtle difference but an important one they're not sequential you work on the side-by-side the elephant in the room in all of this is that there's no part of the process where you were just simply learning I mean that sounds ridiculous right you're planning to study at university and I'm telling you not to focus on learning well it's ridiculous but it's true if you focus on completing your assignments and preparing your exams from day one the learning will happen along the way of its own accord I guarantee that you will come out of this process with a great deal of knowledge it's just that you'll also be demonstrating that knowledge through your assessments in a way that gets you great marks if you're not convinced that's okay stick with me because in this next section we're going to drill down one step lower in the process so we started this video by talking about what a law degree looks like then we drilled down one level and looked at what a single subject looks like now I want to talk about what an individual week in that subject looks like na you should tackle it to do this though we do run into a couple of difficulties because there's some variation between universities in terms of how material is delivered this is especially the case for external students who are either learning completely online or learning by way of semester schools where all the lectures are crammed into just a few days in the non teaching week so what I'm going to do is stick to what I regard as a a fairly typical structure for each unit you'll have a number of learning resources first and foremost there's usually a lecture lectures are usually an hour to two hours long if you're studying on campus you may have the option of going to a lecture theater and seeing the lecture delivered lives this has been the primary mode of teaching law for the last 150 years in most cases though these days the lectures are also recorded and made available online usually with the PowerPoint slides or whatever that support them lectures are usually but not always delivered by the subject coordinator and that's the person who's in charge of the subject despite what your university may tell you attending lectures in person is not important there are no advantages to attending a lecture in person for one thing lectures are usually not interactive questions are usually not encouraged if the lecturer does encourage student interaction we'll then it'd be a good idea to go to the lecture otherwise why would you listen to the lecture while sitting in a very small desk space in a crowded lecture theater with no ability to Pitts pause while you're taking notes no ability to get up and stretch when you like and the requirement to adjust your own timetable and be at the University at a specific time as madness the lectures themselves though are crucial for a number of reasons first up a good lecture is going to be able to take the material for that week and package it up in a way that makes a whole lot of sense good lecturers can absolutely be worth their weight in gold unfortunately the university systems do not tend to reward good lectures lecturers are promoted on the basis of their capacity to obtain grant money for research projects which is really pointless in an area like law where journal articles of barely ever read even by other academics but that's how it is a successful researcher who is a rubbish lecturer will get promoted more quickly than a great lecturer whose focus is on students the second and far more significant advantage of lectures is that they reveal to you which aspects of the material are going to be emphasized by the lecturer there any weekly topic there's going to be way more potential content that anyone could ever cover in two hours so the lecturer has chosen out what they believe are the key concepts that students must know this information is pure gold because that same lecture is setting the exam and that same letter is setting the assignments by listening carefully to the lecture material you're getting an insight you know what sorts of things are likely to come up in the exam and what sorts of things are likely to be relevant for your assignment remember the only reason we're listening to the lecture is to help us prepare for her exams and prepare for our assignment now what you listening to a lecture is absolutely vital that you listen actively not passively if you just sit there in your living room for two hours enjoying a glass of red with the lecture playing well you may get some value in but you won't be making best use of the time to make best use of the time you need to be taking notes the notes will come in useful if you're following my study plan but even if you never touch the nuts again they're me a process of taking them will assist you link let me explain how that works first up if you're taking notes this forces you to actively pay attention to what's being said to think about why the messengers been to live in and then to reinterpret it in your own words that fires up a bunch of parts of your brain that are not required if you're just simply listening more importantly it signals to your brain that this stuff is stuff that ought to be remembered it's important enough to take notes on so it's important enough to be selected by your brain for a recording in memory second if you're clever and take your notes longhand using a pen or pencil your brain has to do even more work it's a lot more complicated to make your fingers form the letters of each word than to just tap a keyboard where it's the same action over and over no matter what letter you were writing again this engages more parts of your brain and forces them to get working this in turn helps to lock in that information now while we're talking about long handwriting taking you notes long head has another real advantage when it comes to exam time is he in the modern world we hardly ever have to write things we're almost all the digital natives now used to recording everything on a keyboard but remember the purpose of everything we do every semester is to pass that exam and in almost all cases that exam is going to mean sitting down at a desk and writing with a pen for two or three solid hours some students I suspect more than you realize sit down for that first exam and they've never actually written for two solid hours before in the whole life and before the end of those two hours if fingers are fatiguing perhaps even cramping the writing is becoming harder and harder to read and they're thinking more about how much their fingers hurt than about the law they're dealing with regular note-taking with a pen through the semester trains those muscles that you'll be putting to the test on exam day so we've got a lecture in many cases you'll also have a tutorial traditionally these we're done in groups of about a dozen or so in smaller classrooms led by a postgraduate student or by the lecturer that sort of tutorial still exists but now we also see many universities going for online tutorials using software tools like su tutorials are usually shorter than lectures roughly an hour in length and because the group is so much smaller they are expected to be interactive ideally the tutor is hoping that they will start the conversation off and then they just facilitate discussion between the students unfortunately tutorials rarely work this way because too few students arrive at the toutes prepared for discussions so the tutorial basically becomes a rehash of the lecture and a waste of your time unless you need the revision the other thing with tutorials is that because they are interactive you have to be able to participate whenever the tutors schedule so you can't time shift the choot in a way that you can with the lecture when it comes to toots my suggestion is first that you try for a tooth as late in the week as you can match so that you've got time to prepare and second if you're finding that the cheats are of no value to you you should contact the tutor and very politely express your concerns if the tutorials are not listed as being compulsory then honestly you may well find better things to do with that out for the rest of this discussion though I'm going to assume that we've struck it lucky and the tutorial is going to be worthwhile the third type of learning resource is your textbook some universities supplement the textbook with course notes these are the hardcore reading materials which will take up a lot of your time all the detail and depending on the subject they can be a good relatively conversational read or they can be more work than you want to imagine last but not least you'll be expected to become familiar with the key cases relevant to each topic and that to many of you who are new to the study of law the importance of this might not be immediately obvious however the law develops in two ways the first and most obvious way is that the Parliament makes noodles the second way that the law develops is that individual cases come before the court and the court gives long and detailed explanations of why they make the decisions they make those decisions then become precedents for later decisions which means that when the court comes across other similar situations they rule on it in the same way so to understand the law you have to understand the cases sometimes your lecturer may provide you with the cases but often you'll be expected to find them for yourselves usually on databases either freely available online or three to university library and sometimes using an actual hard copy book we're going to look at how to find cases towards the end of this video so those are if you like our four official sources of information lectures tutorials textbooks or notes and cases in addition there are a range of informal sources of information available online there's a range of websites that offer summaries of cases at the moment for my own youtube channel has more than a hundred two-minute case notes where I explain cases in 400 words or less other websites have written case summaries some sites exist for sharing notes and some sites exist for sharing essays Wikipedia now has many thousands of legal articles a few years ago any lecturer worth their salt would have been telling you to avoid those sources like the plague but got to be quite hypocritical of me given that I have a couple of hundred videos online to help law students besides which everyone does and there's no point burying our head in the sand so instead of saying don't do it let me give you a couple of pointers first things first never ever be tempted to take an online essay and use bits of it for your own I can't emphasize this enough this is plagiarism or academic dishonesty and not only can it get you in trouble with the university but if you do want to eventually practice law a finding of academic dishonesty can actually be enough that you will be refused admission to practice so the stakes for law students are way higher even than for other university students this on its own should be enough to keep you away from the essay sharing sites it's just not worth the risk as for other sites offering case summaries and similar things these can really be useful as long as you bear a few things in mind first up if you use them they should be supplements to your study not replacements for your study nothing is going to replace the need to listen to the lecturers into a whole bunch of reading that's just the territory that comes along with being on less you if you rely on the summaries then you will not be building a bunch of incidental skills like research skills but also you might be exposing yourself to the writing styles of judges and the processes of reasoning that they use second you need to think hard about the sources of your summary materials on many of these thoughts materials are uploaded anonymously they could be coming from a high court judge but they could be coming from a year twelve legal study student you have no idea this is why my name is so clearly attached to my materials to give people confidence that the materials are being provided by a legal practitioner where the histories of legal academic third and I can't emphasize this enough ensure that the material you're using are intended for Australian students it's no good looking at a set of notes on say the law of negligence and then finding that those notes are actually written for American students in many cases the Lord will be quite similar in countries which share the heritage of English law but even then you'll end up referring to the wrong cases and sometimes you may end up referring to laws which simply don't exist in Australia so be super careful now let's assume we have all these materials what should your week look like how are you going to use these materials now remember our purpose each week is to develop our exam prep notes for each week so we're going to start out by working out what those exam prep notes should look like I'm going to show you a method that really works for me and for many other students this is not the only method for instance some students swear by mind maps those things just drive me nuts so here's my method you play with it as you will but you must have a method you must have a focus to help you deal with all the material that you're going to be facing on a weekly basis my exam notes for each week contain four simple elements a summary key rules and concepts at least one case feeds rule and concept and then a quote from each case I'm going to give you an example but let me emphasize again I'm showing you these backwards I'm going to start by showing you what our weekly exam prep notes look like but then I'm going to go back and show you and get them the summary is a few hundred words long I usually aim for 500 words but I'm not too stressed if it's a bit over or a bit under less than 250 is probably undercooked and more than 750 is probably overcooked if I can do this summary will then I'll have a very short neat little summary in which I can read in a few minutes and which will remind me what each week is about if you have 12 topics then you're talking about only 6,000 words overall to summarize the whole course that's super useful so let's take the dummy contract course I referred to earlier I'm gonna pick you up just as an example the topic called capacity here's what a summary might look like for that capacity topic capacity refers to the capacity to enter into a contract the law starts with the prison that every person is able to enter it or contract and that it removes that presumption in circumstances where a person does not have the capacity to enter a contract the key examples are children people under a medical incapacity usually mental illness people who are intoxicated and people who are bankrupt even in those cases people are not forbidden outright from making contracts for instance children are able to make contracts for necessary goods and services and they are able to make beneficial contracts for employment and education in fact children can enforce pretty much any contract the contract just can't be enforced against them people with a mental illness or people who are intoxicated can still make contracts if they're able to understand the nature of the obligation that they're taking on what if the other party to the contract could not have been expected to know that they were mentally ill or intoxicated bankrupts can enter into contracts as long as they're in good faith and not just a way to defeat the administration of bankruptcy if a person makes a contract while they lack capacity but then they gain capacity for instance by turning 18 or sobering up or recovering from mental illness then they can either repudiate or ratify contracts which then become binding if ratified so they were that's 239 words I'd probably give it some more detail if I was doing it for real but I'm only allowed 22,000 words of scrip for this video so 239 is enough can you see how even in those few paragraphs I've set out the basic concept of capacity and the basic rules just by reading those few paragraphs you have a sound rudimentary understanding of capacity and contract law then I want somewhere between 6 and 10 key principles of law each week the number will vary from topic to topic but you'll quickly become practiced at picking them out they should be expressed in a single sentence so for this topic one of those principles is going to be an intoxicated person still has capacity to make a contract but the contract may be voided if that's so intoxicated that they're unable to understand the effect of what they're doing now if you have a 500 word summary and then that summary expands into ten of these principles you already have a powerful document which you can carry into your exam and used to build great answers to exam questions but we're going to make it better each proposition of law will then be supported by what we call it or authority this usually means either a section in an Act of Parliament or a statement by the court in a case so we support each of our principles with the key authority for that principle in this case your authority is a case called Plumlee and Ryan and then just to put the icing on the cake we go to that case and find a quick little quote that expresses the principle so having read the case I find that justice fool agha has said where the court is satisfied that a contract disadvantageous to the party affected has been obtained by walking drawing him into drink or that there has been real unfairness in taking advantage of his condition the contract may be set aside these days though the cases are not enough for many subjects you'll spend more time looking at legislation rather than cases the process is the same by you list the legal principle and then the part of the statute and finally the relevant quote it looks something like this the age of majority or adulthood in Queensland is 18 that's in the Law Reform Act 1994 section 17 quote the age of majority is 18 years now if you follow this process through what do you end up with each week a short summary with ten legal principles 10 or 30s and ten short quotes in the course of a 12 week term you end up with 12 short summaries 120 principles 120 authorities and a hundred and twenty little quotes all laid out in logical order if you've got that you will smash any exam they can throw at you so imagine we're sitting in our contracts exam and is a problem question we have to advise our client the client has agreed to sell his car for to lower price he was drunk when he made the agreement we open up their notes and the answer is right there and so on our answer sheet we write an intoxicated person still has capacity to make a contract but the contract may be voidable if that's so intoxicated that they're unable to understand the effect of what they're doing in Blom lee and ryan justice fool aghast said where the court is satisfied that a contract disadvantageous to the party affected has been obtained by drawing him into drink or that there has been real unfairness in taking advantage of his condition the contract may be set aside we then apply that rule to the problem scenario and we get a great mark see the power of the tool okay so that's what we want each week how are we going to get we have a lecture near the chip toriel we have a textbook can we have a list of cases ideally particularly if the lecture is early in the week quite dearly you start with the ledger this is because during the lecture as I said earlier the lecture will identify those key principles and they'll usually refer to the cases supporting those key principles many times you'll be able to sit down immediately after the lecture and write out a draft summary and a draft of your ten principles along with some of the case things straight off the bat that's the power of a good lecture the case list then helps you fill in the gaps any case if the lecturer missions should end up on your summary sheet but if there are principles where the lecturer didn't mention a case you can bet those cases will be somewhere on the case list you then have to do the hard Yakka of going into each of those cases reading them over and finding the quotes that are going to support it to principle that's the hardest part of each week once you've done that you should have a good solid draft of your notes for the week a good summary ten principles each with supporting authorities and quotes you then use the textbook in the tutorial for two things first if you've struggled to understand something in the letter I raised it in the tutorial or go into the textbook find that specific section and read about it until you're comfortable that you understand the principle second if there is still any gaps you can fill them either by looking at the cases mentioned in the textbook was simply asking the tutor can you tell me the right Authority for capacity of an intoxicated person I'm not sure I've got all of a sudden we have powerful notes we haven't spent a gazillion hours plotting through incomprehensible textbooks we haven't had to take a hundred pages of notes that we never read and we're already putting together the material that we will need in order to smash the exam it doesn't get much better than that now through this section I've been rabbiting on about the fact that everything we do we do in order to build towards successful exams and successful assignments so to do that successfully we need to talk about what those assessments are going to look like until fairly recently this would have been somewhat easier I mean every subject look pretty much the same it was an assignment maybe two assignments and an exam these days however universities are often trying to be all about innovation so you may find yourself doing all sorts of weird assessments I'm going to concentrate on the classics problem questions short answer questions and topical essays if you can do those you can adapt those skills to pretty much anything else let's start with problem questions as far as I know more is the only subject within the humanities that really uses problem questions for assessment you don't find them for instance in the arts or in economics I think you do find something similar in the sciences or in engineering but honestly a legal problem question is really something unique to the study of law so even if you have other degrees this is most likely going to be something new to you basically the way that a problem question works is that you're given a scenario and then you're required to provide legal advice to one or more of the participants in that scenario so to take the example that we've been using instead of getting a question that simply asks what is the law regarding capacity of a person to enter into a contract you'll get a scenario in which you have to apply that law to something which is similar to the real world in your early subjects the scenarios would be quite simple and then as you advance through the degree they'll get more and more complicated and then you get into practice and you realize that they actually weren't complicated at all compared to the real world we're going to stick with our capacity to contract example a problem question scenario might look something like this Jeremy was a 15 year old star footballer one afternoon at the end of the season he was socialising with his coach big owl at Big Al's place Jeremy had always loved Big Al's car a 1968 mg convertible big owl knew that Jeremy loved that car too what Jeremy didn't know was that the engine and transmission were about to die and the car would soon require thousands of dollars worth of work Big Al gave Jeremy a few beers after all he was nearly grown up and eventually suggested that Jeremy buy the car Jeremy loved the idea he transferred a $500 deposit on the spot and signed a written contract to pay $12,500 more in twenty five monthly installments the next day Jeremy returned with his dad demanding his money back big owl is seeking your advice as to whether he can enforce the contract yeah some of you have already jumped ahead to the end of the process and he's saying no way he can take what's that will you're right but you're getting ahead of yourself you see there are some very clear ways that we have to address problem questions those common ways by following the IRAC process iraq stands for issue rule application conclusion those are the four steps in the process honestly you will go through this process hundreds of times during your board study nowadays in practice I'd do it without thinking virtually every day you will learn about this in a lot more detail in your introduction to more subject and my channel has a whole video on the IRAC method but let's take a brief look now step one is issue we start by looking at the facts and finding the legal issues which the problem requires us to resolve we might also see legal issues that we don't need to resolve so in this case there are two legal issues that we'll need to resolve whether the contractors sell a car to a fifteen year old was enforceable and whether the contract was affected by the fact that Jeremy had been drinking now we can see how the legal issues for instance was it lawful to extend $12,000 in credit to a fifteen year old it wasn't lawful for us to be giving beans to a fifteen year old but the question asks whether he can enforce the contract so we don't want to be diverted by those side issues step two is rule so somewhere you will have been taught legal principles which you can apply to these issues and if you've followed my suggestion players studying you'll have a whole list of them ready to go here's how it would work if he couldn't immediately work out what general area of contract law was relevant you'd start by scanning through your 500 word summaries you'd pretty quickly realized that this question was about capacity and not about saying offer an acceptance so you pull out a couple of pages of notes on capacity you then start looking at the 10 or 12 principles that you've taken down among them you see the following a contract can be enforced against the child for necessaries which are the sorts of items that a child of that age would usually need Peterson Fleming 18 41 51 er 3 14 quote the word necessaries is not confined in its strict sense to such articles as were necessary to the support of life but extended to articles fit to maintain the particular person in the state station and degree in life in which he is a contract cannot be enforced against an intoxicated person if they're so intoxicated that they don't understand the nature of the agreement the case is Blom lee and ryan 1956 99 clr 362 & the quiett stop me if you've heard this one before is where the court is satisfied that a contract disadvantageous to the party affected has been obtained by drawing him into drink or that there has been a real unfairness it taking advantage of his condition that contract may be set aside are you suddenly realizing how powerful these notes are we now know the relevant rules we know the authorities for those rules in other words we know where the rules came from and why they rules and we have a quote from each case all of this is straight off their notes you won't get that if your weekly study approaches merely reading the textbook and highlighting or writing furiously and ending up with 100 pages of chicken scratch so now we move to step 3 when we apply the rule to the facts we now know what the rule is how does that rule play out in our current facts scenario when we write that out suddenly we've got an answer to our problem question it'll look something like this in this scenario there are two relevant legal issues whether the enforceability of the contract is affected by Jeremy's age and whether it is affected by the alcohol which was given to in both big our generally speaking contracts for sales are only enforceable against minors when they are for necessaries which are such things as unnecessary according to the station and degree of the child Peter Fleming 18 41 51 PR 314 Jeremy is a minor as a result the contract would only be enforceable against Jeremy if the car was considered to be a necessary the law in Queensland is that a 15 year old cannot lawfully drive a motor vehicle as a result the car is not unnecessary and the contract cannot be enforced against Jeremy an intoxicated person is still entitled to make a contract the question is whether the other contracting party sought to improperly take advantage of the person's intoxication especially where the other party drew him in to drink Blom Liam Ryan 1956 99 clr 362 it is not clear on the facts of this case where the Jeremy was intoxicated as a result of the beers he drank with big owl it's also not clear whether big owl sought to get Jeremy intoxicated in order to draw him into the contract as a result more facts would be required to provide definitive advice about the effect of Jeremy's possible intoxication however given that the contract is unenforceable against him as a minor it is unnecessary to continue consider this issue further how easy was that our weekly notes gave us everything that we needed to put together a solid answer the final step is conclude this is important but often overlooked you need to finish by saying what the right outcome should be something like this in conclusion the contract is not enforceable against Jeremy because he is a minor and the contract is not for a necessary item and it may also be unenforceable as a result of intoxication depending on facts which are not yet known now before we go any further this is it to our video so I've been doing everything in short form my answer there was about 250 words while you are si is likely to be much longer in more detail I also skipped stuff like providing authorities for the age of majority and the age when a driver's licence is available but despite all that can you see the power of the note-taking process and can you see in general terms how you then take those notes and apply them to a given set of facts to determine the right outcome from those facts honestly that is 80% of all the assessments you will ever do as a law student you'll also run across variations on the theme of problem questions so for instance you might be asked to present oral submissions for a pretend court arguing one side of a case that's really just a problem question with an added oral aspect now let's talk about short answer questions short answer questions will vary dramatically in their length for some lecturers a short answer means a sentence for some paragraph for others half a page it should be made clear to you in the instructions for an assessment how much is required in law exams and assignments there are usually five key types of short answer question the first is a definition question so you'll be given a term or concept and asked to explain so sticking to our example you might get a short answer question which asks when considering contract formation what is a necessary now a good short answer to a definition question will not just give the definition but also an authority for that definition so in this case our answer might be a necessary is something that is necessary according to the station and degree of a miner Peterson Fleming 1840 151 PR 340 a contract to purchase necessaries can be enforced against a miner that's full marks right there we've explained what the concept means we've given it some context and we've provided an authority and where do we get that from the same weekly notes that you would have been developing throughout the course answering the problem question is as easy as finding your notes on the relevant principles the second type of short answer question is an authority question it asks you to indicate the authority for a legal proposition so give to authorities for the proposition that contracts for necessaries may be enforced against minors the answer this principle was established in PES Fleming 1840 151 PR 314 in NASH in Hindman 1908 to kb1 the court then clarified that a contract for necessaries was not binding if the miner Murray has a sufficient supply guess where those answers would have come from you got it straight from the notes the third type of short answer question is an example question it asks you to provide examples relating to a legal proposition so question in this category might be something like give two examples of a situation in which a person might not have capacity to enter into a contract now this is probably the type of short answer question where our notes are at their weakest still super helpful but not just delivering up the answer the reason for this is that our notes focus on being brief while example questions often need you to dig a bit further into the detail but our notes will tell us where to go and look for that detail so for our example question our notes deliver us a nice easy answer a person may not have the capacity to enter into a contract if there are minor and the contract is not for necessaries that's Peters inflaming 18 41 51 CR 3:14 or if the other party to the contract has induced them into intoxication and is taking advantage of that intoxication unfairly Longley and Ryan 1956 99 CLR 362 the final type of problem question is a comparison question this type of question requires you to make a comparison between two concepts or two situations these are the hardest type of short answer question and they genuinely do test whether you understand the material because answering is not just a matter of regurgitating your notes the question might look something like this disputes about capacity to contract may depend on state of mind of the party which had capacity compared Nash and Inman 1908 to King's Bench one with blonde Lee and Rian 1956 99 CLR 362 in this regard now seriously no simple note is going to give you the answer here but the likelihood is that we will have notes on each of those cases and clues to point us in the right direction certainly we're going to be in a better position than the people who rely on highlighters or they take a hundred pages of notes a very brief amount of time spent looking back over those cases will soon give us the answer a comparison answer has three steps talk about the first thing being compared talking about the second thing being compared then make the comparison so it goes like this in Bromley and Ryan the court found that the contract could not be enforced because the parties seeking to enforce the contract not only knew about the other parties intoxication that actively encouraged and this led to unfairness in nation' Inman's the taylor's level of knowledge about whether the minor already had an adequate supply of waistcoats was irrelevant to the question of whether he could enforce the contract as a result it seems likely that if the party with capacity knows of the other parties in bass they'll almost certainly be unable to enforce the contract but in some circumstances they may be unable to do so even if they entered the contract in good faith so to summarize the short answer questions we have definition questions authority questions example questions and comparison questions in each case though if you want the best mark your objective will be to give the sorts of information we recorded in our notes legal propositions or authorities and then some level of understanding or insult okay finally I want to talk briefly about topical or persuasive essays if you've studied any of the humanities before you'll already be really familiar with this type of assessment essentially you're asked to give a view and then to back that view up with argue and then I skip over this type of assessment pretty briefly because it's relatively rare in many more degrees particularly in the black letter law schools now unfortunately in the age of social media people have forgotten how to argue effectively people either substitute screaming and falling for argument will they substitute opinion for argument all those people running around saying well this is my opinion and I'm talking to it they really don't get it I mean sure they have an opinion but unless it can be supported by reasoned argument their opinion has no value a solid persuasive essay does not rely on the strength of your opinions but on the strength of your arguments so how do we do it I'm getting bored with the capacity to contract example let's do something else let's say we've got this topic argue for or against the proposition that believing and validating the experience of victims of sexual assault is crucial even if that means compromising with the presumption of innocence now let's assume I've done my research we'll be talking about research methods later let's just assume that I've decided I will oppose that proposition here's how it go about it you start by carefully working out a one sentence answer to the topic question if you can't come up with a status Factory convincing one-sentence answer and you probably haven't done enough research yet the answer needs to be more than just an expression of opinion it needs to be informed and convincing so in this case we might say while it is important that victims of crimes should be heard and their complaints should be taken seriously the presumption of innocence is fundamental to our system of criminal justice and without it we risk punishing the innocent or if we were arguing the opposite case we might say the presumption of innocence is an important principle in criminal law but so is the presumption that justice ought to be done and in sexual assault cases the presumption of innocence has become a shield to enable offenders to get away with their crimes do you see how each of those demonstrates that the person making the argument has done some research obtains some knowledge and they're about to set out that knowledge step two is to expand that one sentence answer into four or five dot points again this will be easy if you've done the research and impossible if you have it so it's a good gauge as to whether you've read enough if you've done enough research you'll be able to do this if you haven't done enough research you're like I'm only going to do one so the first one might look like this first it is important to ensure that victims of sexual crimes come forward to report their crimes knowing that they will be treated respectfully and that they can trust the process of justice second at the same time it is crucial for the broader operation of society that people believe the criminal justice system only punishes those who are duty third furthermore the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty is one of the fundamental human rights set out in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights finally if we place trusting the victim on the same level as the presumption of innocence it is almost certain that we will criminally punish innocent people can you see how right now I have the structure for my assignment if it's a two thousand word paper I give myself 2,200 words for an introduction 200 words for a conclusion and 400 words for each droplet if I demand from myself safe three references and two direct quotes for each toppling they by the end I'll have 12 references 8 direct quotes I'll have a paper which flows logically and which stays directly on track because everything comes back to that one sentence answer okay before I move off from assessments let's talk briefly about exams exams absolutely terrify a lot of students and I get it they're high pressure situations where you're all terms work comes down to what you're producing a couple of hours and then you make it worse for yourself by getting terrified let's talk about those exams a bit first up virtually every exam that you will ever take at a law school will be an open book exam that means you can bring in anything you like other than electronic sources this means you can bring in the awesome notes that you will have put together if you've been following my process all term you can also bring in your textbook and any other useful notes and sources you need seriously though if you follow my process your notes will be enough with the textbook and the case book as a backup in the exam you can expect to be asked exactly the sorts of questions we've been discussing problem questions short answer questions and the occasional topic or persuasive essay the difference is that in an exam you have to write the answer out longhand they don't expect nearly as much detail but if you develop great notes and get used to dealing with problem questions short answer questions and topical essays you will be a-ok you can also almost always get your hands on past papers which give you a chance to practice the exam before you tackle the real thing okay we're now roughly halfway through this two-hour prep course during the first half of the video we started at the top and drilled down we looked at what your law degree looks like we looked at what each subject is likely to look like we looked at a week in the life of each subject and we talked about strategies for taking notes we've talked about how your learning will be assessed and we've talked about how to do welding those assessments the second half of the video is going to be a bit different in the second half of the video I'm going into some detail about the skills that you will need in order to be a successful law student there is a danger though in me doing this the danger is that you will read what I have to say and you'll think well on stuff then because these are not my skills I promise that's not my intention the skills that I'm going to talk about are skills that you can develop and even if you have these skills you can improve them so what skills will I be talking about I'm going to start by talking about advanced literacy and then we'll talk briefly about formal logic these are the two really key underlying skills for lawyers and law students and most people never stop to think about them we'll talk briefly about referencing in law school and finally we'll move on from skills and talk about some of the extra curricular things you can do to support your study at the law so advanced literacy we're going to start with a fundamental proposition one of my favorites you hear me say it time and time again the law is made of words cases are made of words statutes written laws are made of words contracts are made of words textbooks are made of words if you won't be a successful law student or a successful lawyer you need to be an expert with words and sadly in Australia most of us are not let me show you what I mean you don't have to Google too far to find out that there is a perception of a literacy crisis in Australia but that crisis usually focuses on the number of students who failed to meet basic minimum standards of literacy which are required to function in the world there's not much attention paid to our declining levels of advanced literacy that is the number of people who can read and write at advanced levels and who have advanced vocabularies but where attention is paid to these things the news is grim there's an OECD study called for the International assessment of adult competencies it groups people into five countries categories for literacy those in the top category category five can perform tasks that involve searching for and integrating information across multiple dense texts constructing synthesis of similar and contrasting ideas or points of view or evaluating evidence in arguments in other words category 5 sounds very much like what lawyers do all day every day in Australia in 2003 a statistical assessment of 17 million of adult Australians between 15 and 74 years of age suggested that eighty-two point two percent of all Australians we're at level three or below just one point two percent of all Australians that's less than 200,000 people were assessed at being level five so in order to be ready to be a lawyer you need to have literacy in the top one and a bit percent there's evidence that literacy has declined over time too the study we just mentioned only began quite recently but when preparing this video I jumped onto the National library's website and opened up a random story from the Sun newspaper in Sydney 12th of july 1910 front page this was one of the sentences the plan the minister had before him at the time the deputation from the council waited upon him with reference to the lease of land showed plainly that the wolf would be built upon a strip of land vested in the council now that's a typical sentence aimed at readers of a working man's newspaper forty three words complex grammar complex vocabulary most level three readers which is most Australians would struggle to read that sentence now how did this happen well it's really been a combination of things for one thing in the 1960s Australian schools started moving progressively further away from learning rules of grammar and foundations of vocabulary such as Latin and Greek roots they did this in favor of a more functional approach to literacy learning by using the language unfortunately what this means is that successive generations of Australians can speak and read English well enough but they have no idea at all of how the language is structured and why this inherently limits people's abilities to grapple with more complicated Texas the ability to deal with dense and long text seems to have gotten much worse in the internet era readers are now used to bite-sized chunks of words which can be processed in a few seconds anything too long on social media gets that derisive TL DR meaning too long didn't read the education system which seems to be hooked on technology has adapted to these new learning styles and what it all means in the end is students who don't understand the architecture of the language and who aren't used to reading or writing dense and complicated text unless you're already in the top 2% you will almost certainly have some work to do to develop your advanced literacy as you study law so how you're going to do this well first up you can't rely on your law school most law schools have now adapted to the lack of advanced literacy among students and so well it remains true that better written papers school more highly poorly written papers very few markers are going to bother correcting your grammar this is a problem when you leave University and actually practice law at that point professional writing will be demanded if you want to write at a professional level you'll have to work it out for yourself fortunately there are things you can do first and foremost read books there is a consistently proven gap between the literacy levels of those who read regularly and those who do not but when I say read I don't mean crime novels or trashy fictional articles online I'm suggesting that you read literature top quality writing which has proven itself over decades or centuries by reading the work of the best author in history you will slowly accumulate exposure to the full language read Dickens or will Huxley Bronte lagoon Rushdie Asimov trollop oh Henry Mark Twain Eurus Heller Kafka Thackeray Lessing if you're feeling really game read Tolstoy the more you read and the better you read the more you would develop your advanced literacy it's like being at the gym you can't say that every rep you ever do makes you measurably stronger but over time it accumulates well you can't say that every page you ever read improves your advanced literacy but over time in a kingdoms second when you are reading have a good quality dictionary available to you relish the new words that you haven't encountered before every time you acquire a new word you acquire the ability to express a new concept or to express an old concept in a new way third take the time to learn about grammar and about writing there are some wonderful resources about Keynes Oxford's guide to writing is my favorite but there are many others which break down the writing process and start to build your ability to use grammar effectively this is something which can be studied and learned and practiced now I'm not saying it turned into some sort of grammar purist constantly correcting your friends Facebook posts but what I am saying is it the more you understand the rules of grammar the more easily you will understand and comprehend the sort of dense writing that you will encounter during more study and the more easily you'll be able to write effectively forth get yourself a style manual style manuals by ridiculously useful but most people have never even heard of them the Australian government produces the gold standard style manual in Australia and you can pick up a copy for about 35 bucks it contains even more tricks and guidelines when should you write a number out and when should you spell it what's the difference between your majesty and your highness and your excellency which words should be capitalized all these sorts of things I found in the Stallman v and finally get yourself a book we'll do it online course in periphery most students these days acknowledge that proofreading is necessary but virtually nobody actually knows how to do it if you learn to proofread you get more than just the ability to carefully read your own materials you also get the ability to expertly read other people's writing in a deep and comprehensive way if you have six months before you're going to be studying law and you spend that six months reading great works of literature and spending a little while each day looking into a writing guide or a style guide or a proofreading God you will emerge a far more powerful user of the language and therefore a far more effective lost you if you're starting a little soon or you've already started and find a little time each day even just ten or fifteen minutes so do these things and you'll watch your grades skyrocket for an examiner or an employer or a judge reading professionally authored writing is just a joy and a relief you can reap the benefits of that okay I'm going to get off my soapbox about advanced literacy yeah the next thing I want to talk about is little logic you see it's one thing to write beautifully but when you're writing in the law you're always trying to either explain something or persuade someone or understand and then respond to someone else's argument it doesn't matter how beautifully you write if the ideas that you're expressing are not logically well constructed logic is another one of those things which we seem to learn on the go as we progress through childhood and as a result we learn it quite poorly we can tell this because of the rampant number of fallacies we see ruling the day in politics in commerce in the law in our daily lives we'll talk more about fallacies shortly and yet logic can be learned it is the heart of successful reasoning broadly speaking there are three types of logic relevant to us deductive logic inductive logic and a deductive logic I promise these terms will make more sense in a few minutes time all three are extremely important to understand and while I'm going to outline them they are causes of study in themselves working your way through a good book on logic will be a valuable use of your time as I've lost you let's start with deductive logic deductive logic is a formal way of taking a series of propositions which are called premises and then adding them up almost mathematically to produce a solution when you're using deductive logic if all the premises are true then the conclusion must be true so a simple example all chickens lay eggs Agnes is a chicken and therefore Agnes lays eggs you can see that if it is true that all chickens lay eggs and if it's true that Agnes is the chicken then it must be true that Agnes lays eggs if the premises are true then the conclusion must be true let's look at a more complex one if the wind is throttle or if it's raining it is not a good day for a picnic the wind is strong today therefore it is not a good day for a picnic you can see that our first premise here contains a number of factors first up we're saying that whether it's a good day for a picnic or not is a conditional question it depends on other factors and it depends on two other factors whether the wind is strong and whether it is raining however either of these factors on their own is enough to make it a bad day for a picnic today the wind is strong so it's a good day so it's not a good day for a picnic now let's imagine we change that proposition slightly so it looks like this if the wind is strong and if it is raining it is not a good day for a picnic the wind is strong today therefore it's not a good day for a picnic can you see that the argument here is no longer true because to make it a bad day for a picnic when wind and rain both and we don't know whether it's raining or not so we can't conclude that it's a bad day for a picnic logicians use a series of special symbols to sometimes make very long and complicated series of propositions it's a very powerful tool but what I'm we're carrying on about as a tool for Lewis well let's consider a provision in a contract which says if the delivery is late and the later delivery is the sellers fault or if the goods are delivered to the wrong address that buyer will be entitled to a discount of 25% if we break this down logically it tells us that there are two conditions which can result in a discount one is delivery to the wrong address if the goods are delivered to the wrong address the discount applies the second is if the goods are delivered late and if the late delivery is the fault of the seller so if the goods are delivered to the right address but they're late and it's not the fault of the seller will the discount doesn't apply you see how important it can be to break the propositions down let's look at another from the criminal law in the criminal law we break offences down into their elements and the prosecutor must prove every one of those islands so stealing is one taking two of a thing capable of being stolen three belonging to another person for without the person's permission five and with the intention to permanently deprive the true owner of the thing all five of those propositions have to be present in order to have steal if any one of them is not there the defendant is not guilty this logic is powerful stuff now I have to emphasize there's so much more to it than what I've outlined here any time that you spend between now and the start of your law degree learning about deductive logic will help you train your brain in the skills required by a successful war student or a successful loyal so let's say we have an argument in deductive logic let's let's go back to our chicken argument all chickens lay eggs Agnes is chicken therefore Agnes lays eggs now we've already see that if the two premises are true the conclusion must inevitably true but what if we want to argue that the conclusion is false well there are two ways we can do it first we can show that one of the premises is not true so in this case we might say to our opponent we do not agree that all chickens lay eggs some chickens aren't roosters and they do not lay eggs can you see that by making that response we've ruined their argument we no longer know that Agnes lays eggs because it's no longer true that all chickens lay eggs Agnes could be a wrister the second way we can defeat the argument is by showing that the premises do not in fact add up to the conclusion so let's say the argument went like this all chickens lay eggs Agnes is that chicken or a fruitcake therefore Agnes lays eggs straight away just on instinct you can see that this looks wrong the premises don't add up to the conclusion these two lines of attack work will in the law as well let's go back to our stealing argument stealing was one taking two of a thing capable of being stolen three belonging to another person for without the person's permission five and with the intention to permanently deprive the true owner of the thing if we can show that any of those propositions are wrong then we defeat the charge so for instance if the thing taken does not belong to anyone else then it's not stolen but we can also defeat this charge by showing that the propositions do not add up to the conclusion so for instance with stealing there's a defense called mistake of fact so a person might take a thing capable of being stolen from another person without their permission intending to keep it and yet it still may not be stealing if the person taking the item genuinely thought it was theirs so our argument would be that even though all five things were true they don't necessarily add up to stealing he's starting to get a sense of how powerful logic can be for a lawyer or a law student next we turn to inductive logic inductive logic is less than neat and deductive logic but it's far more flexible you see deductive logic works with absolutes if the premises are true the conclusion must be true in the real world though is usually a lot more messy than that isn't it things don't tend to be absolute we're really if they're operating with full information inductive logic operates in those situations where we have to deal with uncertainty so inductive logic binds in the idea of probability the key to inductive logic is that it starts with specific observations and then it develops a general conclusion from those observations let's consider an example every Saturday night for the last six weeks I've heard police sirens in my neighborhood today is Saturday therefore tonight I will hear police sirens in my neighborhood you can see a few things straight away first up unlike deductive logic it's possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false so it might well be the case that I've heard sirens every Saturday night and it might well be the case that today is sadly and you know I still might not hear any tonight it might just be quite not the second thing is that strength of the conclusion depends on the strength of the observations so if we made the same argument but it was twelve weeks and not six weeks then we would think the argument was stronger a lot of legal reasoning relies on inductive logic for instance there's an important negligence law case called wild and very mr. very was severely injured when he died when he dived from a cliff into shallow water the argument that he made unsuccessfully in me was that the council knew people died from that cliff and that they should have known people would continue and so they should have erected warning signs can you see the inductive reasoning here the argument was that all of those previous individual observations should lead to the conclusion that the conduct would continue the big challenge for inductive reasoning is that as human beings we often get pattern recognition completely wrong and we make the wrong conclusions from our observations stereotyping whether by gender or race sexuality or anything else is a great example of this people take their own experiences and then they usually remember those selectively and they draw conclusions that are completely wrong to take an example when I was a kid it was common to hear people talk about women drivers suggesting that women were less competent at driving than men now it's luckily enough that the people expressing those opinions had seen incompetent women by incompetent driving by women and it noticed but they would have also seen a whole heap of very competent driving by women which they didn't register and they would likely have seen a whole heap of incompetent driving by men which they're conveniently ignoring and so because of this selective pattern recognition they end up with a completely wrong conclusion so while inductive logic is natural and powerful pretty much the only way to make sense of the world where we don't have complete information it also carries some real dangers and we should interrogate those inferences that we're making to be sure they're not just biases finally a deductive reasoning abductive reasoning happens when you take a series of observations and ask yourself what is the best explanation for these observations so abductive reasoning is similar to inductive reasoning in the sense that you're dealing with incomplete facts the difference is that inductive reasoning looks forward and asks what is going down a deductive reasoning looks backwards and asks what happened this is the basis of almost every case that relies on any form of investigation I'm not going to take abductive reasoning any further at this point because this is a prep video and in law school you're almost never going to be doing anything investigative when you get into practice you'll use abductor reasoning for instance if you're interviewing a client your whole purpose is to work out what happened so you'll start with the facts that you have and try to work backwards to uncover the story at university though you almost always be given the facts and the worst thing you can possibly do is start inventing new facts in a problem question I one side logic there are a bunch of things we call fallacies and biases these are insanely important but you won't get taught about them at uni fallacies and biases look like logic they seem logical if you're not listening hard it is super easy to be fooled by them but they're wrong politicians salespeople and other untrustworthy types of people use fallacies and biases all the time the unfortunate reality is that your opponents during your legal career will do the same so it's important to be able to spot these things now I could probably do a two hour of course just on fallacies and biases so I'm not going to be able to cover the lot here but here's a general introduction to a couple of the more prominent ones we'll start with fallacies fallacies are errors in the actual logic of your thinking there are dozens but here our fourth the first one is sometimes called the old scores fallacy but many people still give it its latin name post hoc ergo propter hoc which means after it therefore because of it this is the false idea that people often get that because one thing follows another in time the two must be related consider a neighborhood which until now has been a quiet neighborhood then some new people moving and they're in some way different to the rest of the neighborhood it might be racial or religious or a matter of social class but in some way they stand out and after they arrive there's a spate of burgle reason then they put people begin to say this sort of thing never used to happen in their neighborhood it's only started since those new people moved in can you see that what people are doing here is leaping to the conclusion that because the burglaries followed the arrival of the new neighbors the two things must be related and can you see that in fact there is no basis for that assumption at all it could simply be that a gang of youths from a nearby suburb that began committing burglaries it could be that a professional burglar was working the area over it could be anything by leaping to the unsupported conclusion that because the burglaries followed the new arrival they must have been caused by the new arrival the locals are falling into a logical fallacy it kinda seems like it's logical but it's not next the false equivalence are you see this a lot in politics and boy does it irritate me the false equivalence fallacy occurs when someone assumes that because there are two sides to an argument they need to be treated as though they equally possible and equally valid they need to be given equal airtime this happens for instance when someone says well there are two sides to the climate change debate and we need to listen to both sides they say this even though one side has the overwhelming support of virtually every scientist in the world plus hundreds of research papers and thousands of real world observations of everything from ice cores to hurricanes and the denial side has pretty much money in such a case treating the two sides is equally valid is a fallacy the proper way to deal with a situation like this is to treat one side is overwhelmingly likely and the other side is overwhelmingly unlikely the next fallacy is quite closely related to false equivalence this one is called the compromise fallacy or the middle-ground fallacy this is the idea that some people have that if you have a strongly held opinion on one side and it's strongly her opinion on the other side then the truth must be somewhere in the middle now of course sometimes that's true we might even say there often it's true but it is not the basis for a logical assumption for instance one of the greatest technological achievements of humankind was placing human beings on the moon it's a celebrated achievement for many reasons and yet there are plenty of people out there who strongly believe that we did not get to the moon and that it was all done on a soundstage somewhere in Hollywood or in the deserts in Arizona the middle ground would say well maybe we our fate of the moon how Menace is Lucas but in other situations it's tempting I mean let's say one group of people strongly believe that left-handed people commit massive amounts of crime and another group of people believe that left-handed people commit no crime a compromiser might say well I'm sure some left-handed people commit crimes so perhaps they should be under greater surveillance the false equivalence fallacy and the compromise fallacy both teach us that sometimes the extreme views our valid and sometimes they're not and we should not make any assumptions without examining the evidence the false equivalence people assume that the extremes are necessarily true the compromised person assumes that the middle ground is true none of these assumptions are safe the final fallacy I want to talk about is the straw man fallacy this happens when someone is trying to rebut would defeat someone else's argument but instead of replying to what their opponent actually says they reframe that argument to make it weaker and then attack the weaker version the most notorious version of this in recent years happened repeatedly during an interview on BBC four television where presenter Kathy Newman interviewed clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson the interview has at the time of recording being watched around about 20 million times on YouTube throughout the interview virtually every time Peterson gave an answer Newman reframed it starting the next question with so what you're saying is during the interview Newman raised the idea of the gender pay gap Peterson acknowledged that there was a difference between the pay of men and of women and he explained it this way but there's multiple reasons for them one of them is gender but that's not the only reason if you're a social scientist worth your salt you never do a univariate analysis you say women in aggregate are paid less than men okay we then break that down by age we break it down by occupation we break it down by interest we break it down by person now Newman answered and here we go with these strong men Newman answered but you're saying basically it doesn't matter if women aren't getting to the top because that's what's skewing the gender pay gap isn't it you're saying that's just a fact of life women aren't necessarily going to get to the top Petersen tried to hold his ground he said no I'm not saying it doesn't matter either Newman continued you're saying that it's a fact of life Peterson cut in I'm saying that there are multiple reasons for it Newman continued knocking over strong men she said yeah but why should women put up with those reasons Peterson answered I'm not saying that she'd put up with it this continued for an excruciating half an hour ending with Peterson attempting to explain that lobsters which are so different to humans still organize their societies in hierarchies which suggests that hierarchies arise from something other than human patriarchy hilariously Newman followed this with so you're saying that we should organize our society along the lines of lobsters can you see our Newman did not once respond to Peterson's actual comments she reframed each of them to suit her own agenda and then attacked those reframed questions in order to try to make him look like a neat the unfortunate thing is that this is often an effective technique in argument especially when it's done with more skill and subtlety than Newman managed always think are they actually answering my point now I would briefly look at four biases biases are not logical fallacies as such they're more about the way that we think and the way that we approach problems that we need to solve again there are many but here's some major ones that you're strikers are lost you the first one is called confirmation bias this is the tendency of people to pay more attention to or give more credit to information that supports their pre-existing views so information that confirms their pre-existing viewpoint so let's say that you were examining a parole application and for some reason you really wanted the person to be parole from the application you learn four things one the applicant was in prison for a very serious violent crime - the applicant has spent most of their time in prison working out in the exercise yard to build muscle 3 the applicant has been well behaved in prison and is not required any disciplinary actions and for the applicant has not participated in the prison's anger management programs now a neutral person would look at this and say well this prisoner isn't ready for parole they have a history of violence more Muslims and no more ability to control their anger but the person who wanted them paroled would say well they've been well behaved in prison so they should be paroled you see how that person is focused on the one thing that supports their pre-existing bias in the real world you see a lot of this when it comes to racism if someone perceives Muslim people as dangerous extremists they will focus on the news of an individual committing serious crimes and they'll not give any weight to the thousands of Muslims who just live their lives in our community that's confirmation bias it's dangerous and you see it everywhere learn discipline the next one is called the dunning-kruger effect this one is really fascinating Dunning and Kruger mapped people's actual expertise at various things and then mapped them against those people's perceptions of their own expertise what they found was that people who have virtually no expertise in an area often have a massive sense that their own expertise they believe that that far more competent than they actually are as people then gain knowledge their perception of their own expertise actually decreases this happens because they start realizing how complicated things actually are and how much they have to learn once they begin to reach true expertise their self perception starts to rise again and so the people who have the most confidence are those with virtually no expertise and those with massive expertise you see this a lot in the law you'll see many people they have little or no expertise but who are absent they convinced that they're experts they'll have the same level of confidence as a senior barrister or High Court judge they just won't have any actual competence to back it up now imagine that same person starts a law degree they pretty quickly realize there's a lot more to this law business than they ever learned by watching TV and their confidence quickly erodes but then as they actually learn things and gain expertise and experience their confidence slowly builds again what do we learn from this we learn that you should not be fooled by another person's confidence or by their assessment of their own competence as you move through the law you will come across dozens of opponents do everything they can to project confidence in their own case in their clients case and you'll almost certainly do this yourself as part of the game at the same time you will secretly feel very aware of your own ignorance this is normal at first the more you learn the less confident you'll be but eventually it will swing upwards and you develop confidence based on your own genuine competence the third bias is kind of related to Dunning Kruger we call this the framing bias or the messenger bias this occurs when people find an argument more persuasive or less persuasive depending on the cues they get from the person delivering the message this is why lawyers wear suits and barristers wear robes I mean a work would show up in court and make exactly the same arguments while wearing a pair of thongs for tea shorts and a blue singlet but the impact of the message would be reduced in the same way attractive salespeople tend to be more successful than less attractive ones even if they have less knowledge juries may find witnesses more or less convincing depending on the way they look it's really quite sad that this is true but it genuinely is when I was lecturing at universities like quite often insert into a problem question the fact that a certain person was a a junkie or a prostitute and students would really want that person to lose even if it was irrelevant don't be like that analyse the message not the messenger finally the last bias I is super important for more students this is called the just world or the expectation of justice bias this happens when people really want the world to be a just and fair place and so they act like it's going to be even though it often isn't the difficulty for law students is of course that the law aims for justice we want the law to produce justice and so when we look at a problem question it's really easy to begin by asking what would be a just outcome here the problem is that as lawyers we focus on the law and let justice work itself out this means that sometimes we follow the law even when the outcome seems awful you can't begin by assuming the outcome will be justice let me give you an example in a case called Mikael and Watson a 12 year old boy through a short sharpened metal rod in the direction of a younger girl it hit her and resulted in the loss of the poor girl's eye she sought compensation the court had to consider two questions first whether the duty of care held by the boy should have been the same as the GD of carefree adult the court said no it should be judged by the standards of a normal child of that age welfare that sounds reasonable the second question for the court was whether a normal 12 year old who understand the danger of throwing a dart at headway in the direction of another person three out of the four judge had said in essence that this was just boys being boys and that he need not have realized the danger only one of the judges took the view that no sensible boy would have thrown the dart and as a result Susie Mikael got no compensation now if we were dealing with a problem question on similar facts anyone with a sense of justice would say this girl deserves compensation through life long mutilation and disability but to get a good mark in the assignment you would have to apply the law you'd have to look not at that damage but at the duty of care to be expected of the childhood cause the damage you might not always like the results by the time you become a lawyer you will no doubt realize that justice is something you have to fight for it's often not something that occurs now the law can be a rough business on that uplifting and happy note let's quickly review the two key underlying skills that I suggest every law student work on our advanced literacy and logic advanced literacy you can develop by reading great literature by expanding your vocabulary by using grammar reference books and style guides and by learning the professional skill of proofreading logic you can learn by obtaining materials to teach you about deductive logic which deals in absolutes with mathematical precision inductive logic which uses probability to build up expectations from many observations and abductive logic which works backward from an event to try to work out what happened and when using logic you need to also learn about and avoid logical fallacies and cognitive biases there are a couple of more things I want to talk about before our two hours of the next one is about basic research strategies this is kind of difficult in a prep course video you can probably understand that research really is contextual and your research strategy depends on what you're researching and at the moment you haven't learned any actual law but there are still some basic tools I want you to know that these are research tools with really only cater to the law world and so even if you have a lot of experience as a student you may not know about these I want to talk about three the website called Asli a database called Hall's briefs and the method of what we call citation for cases I'm going to start with citation earlier in this video when I was looking at problem questions you will have seen that I referred to cases a few times and when I did I wrote a bunch of cryptic looking letters and numbers after each case remember I look like this you may well have been thinking what on earth is all that about were those letters and numbers give us what we call the citation details for each case over time as a law student reading and understanding these will become second nature to you in general there are two types of citation that you'll come across in Australia the Americans have their own really weird system which I'm not going to deal with in this video in Australia you'll find the traditional or bound volume system of citation and the medium neutral citation don't worry if you don't understand those terms here I assume the bound volume system of citation is based on old-school physical libraries now I was planning to do this section of the video from an actual library but I'm recording this during the great coronavirus shutdown of 2020 and social distancing rules mean I can't really go to the library now the citation gives you a number of pieces of useful information first it tells you the year then it tells you the volume then it tells you the series and finally the page so one of the questions we looked at in our discussion of problem questions was Plumlee against Ryan which has the citation information 1956 99 CLR 362 what's that telling us well because I've been around for a while I know that CLR stands for the commonwealth war reports which is a collection of the decisions of the High Court of Australia and some from a court called the Privy Council which is no longer part of our system so the citation is telling me that if I want to read this case which was heard in 1956 I go to the Commonwealth law reports pull out the volume 99 open it up to page 362 and there it'll be with these citations you can find an individual case from among the thousands of volumes in the library no catalog required no browsing required the system is awesome let's try it one more time Peters against Fleming has the citation 18 41 51 er 314 now this is a pretty old case and many of the old cases from before about the 1860s have been collected together into a massive big collection known as the English reports the citation is er so we go to the English reports in the library we pull out volume 151 open to page three four there we are now obviously to make this work you do need to become familiar with the initials for various report series honestly though most of the time they come from a pretty narrow range on the screen at the moment are a few of the most relevant report series for Queensland students but those of you from elsewhere will quickly find that you become familiar with the most common report series in your jurisdiction finally some report series don't actually have volume numbers instead they have one volume for each year so there's a 1976 volume you can tell these series from the citation itself for one thing there won't be a volume number but also you see the year in square brackets not round brackets again this becomes second nature after a while the second type of citation which I mentioned was medium neutral citation this term began to be used when the internet and Internet research was still quite young and many databases were still on CD ROMs and recordable DVDs nowadays what they call a medium neutral citation we would just call an online citation obviously the traditional system of citation is not going to work online because online you don't have volumes and you don't have pages instead the citations follow a different pattern in this video we haven't run into a medium neutral citation yet so pull one out the famous marburo case in 1992 which established the concept of native title and did away with the legal fiction that Australia was terra nullius or empty land at the time the Europeans arrived the medium neutral citation for this case is 1992 HC a 23 what this is telling us is that this was in 1992 case heard by the HCA High Court of Australia and that it's sequence number for that year was 23 this gives us everything that we need to find the case on an online database but Anthony right here say what online databases well let's have a look now there are actually a range of databases which learn to use as a loss gene I'm going to focus on two of them here but once you start your studies one of the most important initial tasks will be to go exploring the databases that here we go diversity has they will be available to you on your private home computer as long as you have your university login and these days you can't do well as I lost you unless you're familiar with their use in this prep video I'm going to concentrate on two mind-bogglingly useful databases that you simply must know about the first one is called Asli this stands for the australian legal information institute it started out as a joint project between the University of Technology Sydney and the University of New South Wales but it has since led to similar projects in dozens of countries around the world and to an international version called worldly this is the current front page of Asli it started back in the infancy of the internet and they've only really changed the interface once so once you know how to use Asli you can be pretty confident with it Auslan contains every written law in Australia I'll say that again every single written law in Australia is found honestly and they're easy to find - so let's say we wanted to find Queensland's Mental Health Act 2016 we click on Queensland then on legislation then on consolidated acts a consolidated act is one where any amendments or changes made by the parliament have been corporated into the act then we click on the letter M then we scroll down to the Mental Health Act and click to open it up this brings us to what is essentially a contents page for the Act every section number is a link so you just click the section number booklet section 31 regarding examinations and it opens up the section how easy is that it gets better though let's go back to the home page Asli also contains virtually every decision of every Court in Australia since 1996 and in some cases it goes way back even earlier than that it contains every High Court decision that has ever been made in full let's find the mob a case that we were talking about a few minutes ago the citation was 1992 HC a 23 so HCA tells us this was a high court case the High Court is a Commonwealth Court so we start by clicking see th for Commonwealth and then we click High Court of Australia it was a 1992 case so we open up 1992 the cases are listed month by month we can then either scroll down to find number 23 or just search within the page for the word Marvo click on the case there it is Asli has a bunch of other cool features and i don't want to hit you with too much detail in the prep course it's enough to know for the moment that honestly you can find every law made by every Australian Parliament and thousands upon thousands of cases including all high court cases I don't believe any law student can get through law school in this day and age without using Auslan and I would think a reasonable guess is that during a degree you would use Asli maybe ten thousand times it's your bread and butter and because it's free you can get online and start looking about and lastly right now even if you haven't even applied to study any oh and there's also a mostly app which gives you access to the full database on your smartphone how cool is that the second database I want to talk about is called halls breeze laws of Australia this database is not freely about it it's on a database service called lexis advance Pacific which used to be called LexisNexis back in the dark ages when I was an undergraduate halls briefs was a series of twenty or thirty loose leaf binders which you could find in the law library so what is it well halls breeze is what we call a legal encyclopedia it is mind-bogglingly useful it takes virtually any legal topic you can think of and sets out the relevant principles of law explains them in detail and then provides you with references to both the act of parliament and any key cases relating to that principle if you imagine the exam notes I was talking about earlier in this lecture but on massive steroids covering the entire scope of Australian law you end up with briefs let's have a look I'm gonna start from the main page of halls burries because everything up to that point may look a little different depending on how universities websites set up once you get two walls burries though we should all be looking at the same thing we're going to try and track down the example I've been using throughout most of this video capacity of contract before I do that let's scroll down the table of contents so you can get some idea of just how incredibly useful this tool is administrative law Civil and Political Rights criminal law defamation evidence family law maritime law negligence property succession tour workers compensation dozens more it's awesome now we're interested in capacity to contract which crazily enough comes under contract law we click on the plus sign to open and we can see the different chapters of this particular time introduction formation terms parties vitiating factors illegality performance of breach discharge of contract and ribbies now obviously you're going to need a little bit of knowledge to work through this menu tree you can run a search but it often returns a lot of results and takes some practice to use as a beginner if you're not quite sure what you're looking for you may be best just to browse through the tree for a bit capacity though is about whether you can make a contract so formation seems to be what we're looking for open up formation but it's not there okay so I look a bit further capacity is about whether a particular party or person can be a party of a contract so I open terms and parties and hey presto we see capacity of parties I open that one and look at this it's a list of the different types of parties where there may be different rules we want to know that capacity of minors so we open that one now remember in the case law we discovered that minors can make contracts for necessaries and see if we can find that we open that section in horse burries you can see the topic of necessaries has been broken down it's tiniest elements we click on the first one and for every topic there's a detailed explanation including references to case law there's a reference to Peters and Fleming which we've already encountered in this video as references to statutes cross references to other bits of Paul's briefs even better many of the cases and almost all of the statutes contain links you just click the link and it'll open up the case how easy is that if you need to do independent research for an assignment or if you're not sure you understand something from the weekly materials go to ors burries go straight towards it's gold other than perhaps Asli this is the single most useful tool that a law student can use and yet astoundingly I have run into final year law students who've never even heard of it crazy halls breeze is your friend now look research involves a lot more than Australian Hall's briefs and research is also in many ways quite creative process how I go about it might be different to how you go about there are many other resources out there too but this is a prep course video and as a new starter preparing to get stuck into your law degree Asli and holes please either best research tools to get you off the ground okay we are nearly at the end of our two hours before I finish up though I do want to briefly talk about some useful extracurricular stuff many law schools offer extracurricular activities like mooting a mood is like a mock trial it's a great way to sharpen your research skills and get some practice of standing on your feet in a court like environment and arguing your case if you're part of a successful merging team you may end up representing your University in major competitions in Australia and overseas some students just love moving I'm a little more dubious about it for two reasons first mooting takes up a lot of time it's like adding an additional major assignment to your workload every time you do a much you'd need to either really love it or really see a potential future payoff in order to take on that extra work second mooting simulates in a in the court of appeal so one step above the Supreme Court let me tell you right now you will be years into the practice of law before you even contemplate standing in front of the court of appeal to argue a case moods teach you little or nothing about the basic skills that you need as a fresh new graduate solicitor if the chance comes up to have a go at merging then by all means do so but honestly the universities place much more emphasis on merging that is really justified and there's a far more effective use of your extracurricular time that far more effective use comes from community volunteering you see I've lost counted the number of times that I've been contacted by student lawyers in universities or through YouTube telling me that they are really worried about that prospects of getting work when they complete their degrees and it's a reasonable fear because the big dirty secret of legal education in Australia is that legal education does very little to train you to be an actual lawyer and that's ridiculous when you're thinking about it so many studies in the nursing degree is expected to do a lot of practical nursing during their degree match to their level of progress and then when they graduate they're ready to be a nurse teachers are expected to do teaching practice and then when they finish their degree they're ready to be a teacher but when you finish your law degree the chances are you'll still have no real idea of how to be a well you might do two courses in contract law and never be asked to draft a contract you might do a course in Civil Procedure and never be asked to draft a statement of claim you might study succession but never be asked to write a will earlier in this video I mentioned PLT or practical legal training which is the short course you do after you complete your degree now it includes a period of time spent working in an actual law firm the theory is that this process is about teaching you the actual skills of legal practice to add to your academic understanding of the law that's essentially bollocks the truth is that penalty is really just a barrier to entering the profession and a cash cow feegan versus you may end up being taught about practical luring by academics who have never themselves actually practice sure you'll spend some time in more firms but your exposure to actual legal practice in those firms may be pretty limited and then you get admitted and you're in the job market in that job market as a fresh graduate the truth is that you have very little to offer because the firm is going to have to invest a lot of time and effort into teaching you to be a lawyer basically completing your education in a way that the university simply don't that's not an attractive business proposition this is why law students have been paralegals or legal secretaries I always snapped up first in the Graduate job market they've been around the legal profession in some cases for many years they may have appeared in court on minor matters I've certainly have been involved in the preparation of documents affidavits briefs to counsel they have the combination of practical skills and academic qualifications so what if you're not a paralegal what can you do to make up for the things the university won't teach you well there are three key ways one is to attend a university whose key focus is developing practical skills some of the universities realized this is what the profession is demanding and they're slowly changing their curricula that provide more practical experience if you want a job on graduation those universities should be your first choice the second way is to compete for summer internships at major firms this is where major firms give you six or eight weeks of work experience over the summer these can be great if you can get one but they're usually intensely competitive selection processes a third way and my suggested way is to get in contact with an organization in the community legal sector there are a range of organizations you could contact Community Legal centres salvos legal humanitarian Queensland's public interest law clearing outs the women's legal service prisoners legal service Aboriginal tourist photo under legal service various refugee legal services these organizations are always looking for committed volunteers now obviously you won't be able to do any actual lawyer ring for these organizations you can't practice without a practicing certificate not under any circumstances but you will be able to sit in lawyers dealing with actual clients who have actual problems you'll be able to help with the drafting of documents which are often then genuinely attended in court you get to know and have the chance to impress some of your local legal practitioners and you'll be doing good things for those in need generally speaking you get the most out of this sort of volunteering if you leave it until you've completed the first year of your degree this gives you enough knowledge to make sense of what you're experiencing but if you start then by the time you graduate you'll have two years of volunteering experience and a decent local network of practitioners you will be way ahead of anyone who has no practical experience even if their grades are better than yours and even if their university has a better reputation okay your head is probably exploding with all this information it's now time to stop the clock I really hope everything that you've learned in the last two hours has been helpful I know that all this stuff would have been helpful to me if someone had taken the time to go through or with me before I began studying the law is hard work but it can be immensely satisfying I'm really confident that if you follow the assessment focus study approach that I've suggested in this video you'll be off to a flying start no doubt you'll adapt it over time to your own unique style of study but the core will be the same understand the material identify the principles add in your authorities smash the answer out of the puck on my channel you'll find a bunch of other resources as you guys read agree this is the sixth of my to our law courses and I'm planning to add more all the time I also have put dozens and dozens of two-minute case notes online I'd love to be part of your study success and I love hearing in the comments or by email about how well you're doing very best of luck and I'll see you again soon [Music] you

Channel: Anthony Marinac

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Length: 124min 48sec (7488 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020