The Law School Playbook

Who says law school doesn’t foster creativity? To the contrary, an effective reading strategy involves visualizing or using imagery to picture what is being described in your law school text.

We have discussed numerous strategies that can prompt you to be an engaged, critical thinker while reading. It is important for you to recognize, however, that your willingness to continually monitor your own thoughts and assess your own understanding as you read is essential to you becoming an expert reader. You must choose to engage in a disciplined analysis of the text, making connections between ideas and considering numerous perspectives. Stated simply, it is up to you to engage in the metacognition—thinking about your thinking—as you work through cases. Being able to recognize the reading strategies available to you may help with that process.

My parents were avid golfers when I was a teen. Every so often I’d join them on the golf course, although I was pretty unskilled. I’d step up to the tee and the well-intentioned coaching from my parents inevitably followed: keep your head down, your arms straight, nice and easy, focus on the follow through, and so on. I remember being frustrated and thinking, “Should I juggle and spin plates on my head at the same time too?”

The law school experience is so focused on reading and interpreting appellate cases that students sometimes overlook the central role that legislation plays in practice. The reading and interpretation strategies in this series of episodes pertains to many kinds of enacted law (or requirements with the force of enacted law), such as statutes, regulations, ordinances, and municipal law. For ease of reference, however, I will refer to the coaching strategies in this series as reading and interpreting statutes.

Celebrity chef Guy Fieri has said:

There are two different things: there’s grilling, and there’s barbecue. Grilling is when people say, ‘We’re going to turn up the heat, make it really hot and sear a steak, sear a burger, cook a chicken.’ Barbecue is going low and slow.

So today, our work of reading and interpreting statutes continues. After the first step—slowing down—the next step is to determine how the statute fits into the big picture. As you learned with case reading, background knowledge, even if acquired just prior to reading the text, makes you a better, more efficient reader. To put the statute in context, take the time to look at the table of contents. Look at the surrounding sections to see how the statute fits into the big picture.

We are continuing our discussion of reading and interpreting statutes. To recap the steps we have covered thus far, when approaching a statute, you must: …

Today, we are picking up our ongoing discussion of reading and interpreting statutes. We will discuss the final step in this episode, which is to resolve ambiguities or to add clarity to vague language.

In this episode, we will be focusing on steps 1 and 2 of reading and interpreting statutes, which we know are to: slow down (step 1) and determine how the statute fits into the big picture by looking at surrounding statutory materials (step 2).

We are going to pick up where we left off in the last episode, where a commercial airline pilot named Sean Fitzgerald showed up for work “rip-roaring drunk” and engaged in pre-flight work before he was arrested. The statute he is alleged to have violated is 18 U.S.C. § 343, and we are now at step 3, which requires us to look at the language of the statute itself and methodically break it down.