This week in the law library we look at five more resources to help you prepare for the Bar Exam, summer legal research tips, and celebrate Pride Month.

Bar Exam Preparation

The Bar Exam is not a sprint, it’s a marathon so pace yourself! Check out this week’s Bar Exam Resource highlights below.

Passing the Bar: A Quick Reference Guide For Today’s Law Student

This e-book, available from CALI, is designed to provide guidance to law students as they prepare to embark upon bar study. It covers topics such as how to make a study plan, strategies for successful bar study, tips for attacking each portion of the exam, taking care of your mental health, and preparing your loved ones for bar study. The book also provides weekly tips for use during the bar study period, and for exam day itself. The quick reference format allows students to easily access advice for whatever is most pressing to them at a particular moment.

Multiple-Choice Questions: Wrong Answer Pathology

This CALI Lesson teaches you how to select the right answer in a multiple-choice question by better understanding how to identify wrong answers, based on nine specific types of wrong answers.

A Methodical Approach to Improve Multiple Choice Performance

This CALI Lesson teaches a methodical approach for all law school multiple choice questions. The step-by-step approach provides a framework to work through questions so students can more easily eliminate distractor answer choices. The lesson will thoroughly explore each step in this analytical approach.

Assessing Your Own Work

Although this CALI Lesson references law school exams, students studying for the bar exam will find it useful. Throughout law school, students will be asked to assess their own essays by comparing them to a model or sample student answer provided by their professor. It can often be difficult to distinguish one’s work from the model. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish what a student knows, from what they wrote down. Experienced legal writers understand that subtle differentiation in language changes the meaning of what was written. This lesson will provide students with strategies for self-assessment, so that they can become critical judges of their work, and consequently precise legal writers.

Metacognition

This lesson focuses upon the concept of metacognition and teaches you how to enhance your understanding about how you learn to better improve your study, organizational, test-taking and self-assessment skills with the goal of improving your performance in law school. The lesson should help you better understand your individual learning process and show you how to use this information to develop study and test-taking skills needed for success.

Summer Legal Research Tips

Get Up to Speed on What Resources Are Available

1. To what resources does your employer subscribe and what are you allowed to access?
2. Does your employer have a library and a law librarian?
3. What internal resources such as document templates, document management systems, and brief banks are available?
4. What citation style is used?
5. Have the vendor help numbers ready to access

 

Ask Questions & Ask for Help

Don’t be afraid to ask questions or to ask for help if you need it. Among the questions to ask:

• When is it due?
• Are there any cost or resource restrictions?
• Who else know about or is working on the project?
• Is there a client ID or billing code that should be used?
• What type of information would be most useful?
• How much information is wanted or needed?
• How is the information going to be used?
• How much time should you spend on it?
• What format should the final product be in?

If you have access to a law librarian at your place of employment, ask for help when you get stuck! You can also ask local law librarians, most Ohio counties have a law library, and we can help you out too! Often the vendors for products are helpful resources. For example, Lexis and Westlaw have reference attorneys on staff who can help with searching.

June Is Pride Month!

About Pride Month

Pride Month is commemorated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. The Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar that police raided on Jun 28, 1969. The raid resulted in days of protest and the uprising is often cited as a catalyst for LGBTQ+ activism.

5 Pride Month Resources

Learn more about Pride Month and LGBTQ+ issues by checking out the resources below!

ABA 21 Day Pride Month Challenge

The ABA Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council invites you to participate in their 21 Day Pride Month Challenge, during which we will immerse ourselves in resources to help support building habits toward Pride learning. Sign up page

ABA Commission on Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity LGBTQ+ Webinars

The ABA Commission on Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity presents four webinars on LGBTQ+ issues:

1. Allyship to Trans People in the Legal Profession
2. Combatting LGBT Implicit Bias in the Legal Profession
3. Sexual Orientation: The Legal Case for Coverage Under Title VII
4. Title VII US Supreme Court Decision: A Discussion and Analysis

 

PBS American Experience, Stonewall Uprising: The Year that Changed America

This PBS film explores the dramatic event that launched a worldwide rights movement. Told by those who took part, from drag queens and street hustlers to police detectives, journalists and a former mayor of New York, and featuring a rich trove of archival footage, this film revisits a time when homosexual acts were illegal throughout America, and homosexuality itself was seen as a form of mental illness. When police raided Stonewall on June 28, 1969, gay men and women did something they had not done before: they fought back. As the streets of New York erupted into violent protests and street demonstrations, the collective anger announced that the gay rights movement had arrived.

Marc Stein, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (UC e-book — must authenticate to access)

Across 200 documents, Marc Stein presents a unique record of the lessons and legacies of Stonewall. Drawing from sources that include mainstream, alternative, and LGBTQ media, gay-bar guide listings, state court decisions, political fliers, first-person accounts, song lyrics, and photographs, Stein paints an indelible portrait of this pivotal moment in the LGBT movement. In The Stonewall Riots, Stein does not construct a neatly quilted, streamlined narrative of Greenwich Village, its people, and its protests; instead, he allows multiple truths to find their voices and speak to one another, much like the conversations you’d expect to overhear in your neighborhood bar.

After Stonewall: America’s LGBT Movement / First-Run Features (Firm) (Films on Demand — must authenticate to access)

Narrated by Melissa Etheridge. In 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, leading to three nights of rioting by the city’s gay community. With this outpouring of courage and unity the Gay Liberation Movement had begun. After Stonewall, chronicles the history of lesbian and gay life from the riots at Stonewall to the end of the century. It captures the hard work, struggles, tragic defeats and exciting victories experienced since them. It explores how AIDS literally changed the direction of the movement.