Law school Prep Books. Will they help? (PLS II, LSC, LSI, ect...)

[St. Shaun]

Sorry is this poll has been done before.  We were discussing this
a bit in another thread and I was wondering what the general thought
was.  Feel free to discuss which ones you found helpful or not (of
course you already do).

You can vote twice because you may have different feelings on different books.

[Abevigoda]

I'm taking them with a grain of salt; after all, some of the advice can only help right?

[norm012001]

I read Law School Confidential.  Unfortunately, it was heavily geared towards people who were going to LS right out of undergrad or who took 2 years off to wander around Europe.  Very little advice to those of us who already have legal experience and no mention of part time school.

The main thing I found interesting were the descriptions of the first year courses and what they were about.  Everything else just seemed to be fluff.

[hempel]

I am also not a fan of Law School Confidential and assume I would dislike PLSII even more since everyone says it is so negative and incites fear. I think rainbow highlighting is a bad idea because of all the unnecessary time wasted juggling all the different highlighters and memorizing what they stand for.

[jacy85]

If memorizing that red=the holding, green = the fact, and 3 other highligher colors is taxing, then I hope you don't have any closed book exams.  I've read through LSC twice, and remember those 2.  Adding 3 more won't be a problem.

[hempel]

I didn't remember that the book tells you what colors to use. Anyway, I think the bigger effort is juggling all those highlighters and lugging them to class with you. I have decided to actually brief, not book brief, because the process of writing things down helps me memorize. To each his own. Rainbow book briefing apparently worked for the guy who wrote LSC afterall.

[St. Shaun]

I'll book brief when I'm crunched for time, and when I do I'll rainbow breif.
I don't plan on using my book for the exam (if I can brief most of the cases)
but the highlighting will help when making notes.

[Ambs]

I read LSC and have PLSII coming this week. I'm finding any information helpful right now, though I may choose to not take their advice word for word.

I agree that the most interesting chapter of LSC was the one the gave an overview of the subjects we'll study. The whole rainbow briefing thing sounded a bit complicated, but I think it could be useful to mark those issues in your book as you read (with a color, symbol, number, whatever) and then maybe do a brief after being able to idenify the important aspects.

Are there books that are more content based than LSC and less about advice on how to study? I'd like to have some general knowledge (not having had a law background) so some important concepts are familiar. Has anyone bought the Examples and Explanations??? I hear they're reccomended but they are a lot of $$$. I want to wait until my loan money comes in!

[danno51]

Ambs I bought examples & explantions torts and civil procedure.  I'm about halfway through the torts book and I think its been very helpful in just giving me a very basic understnding of what i am going to be learning next year.  Also the hypotheticals at the end of each chapter are really good, i've been writing them all out and I think it is going to alleviate a little of the uncertainty and msytery when i go into class next year.  I think i only paid like 15-20 bucks per book on amazon.com, i bought them slightly used.

[sorority girl]

I have purchased a bunch of these and intend to read them by the pool over the summer, if anything just to have an overall idea of what to expect.  BTW, all of you Miami 0L's.. apparently "Getting to Maybe" is a required reading for orientation.  I'm reading it now, and I'm finding it to be pretty interesting.