5 Law Student Must-Haves

There are people who use a lot of tools to do their work. And there are those who use nothing at all.

As for law students?

Well, there are lots of things a law student brings every day to class. But there are five things that I consider a law student list of must-haves. To be sure, law students could live without these things. But these things are so common a property among law students that they seemed to have become part of what a law student must have:

1. Hard-bound Annotated Law Books

For this semester, I have eight subjects: Ethics, CrimLaw 2, Consti 2, ObliCon, Legal Writing, Legal Technique, Intellectual Property, and Restorative Justice. Of the eight, five subjects require a textbook. I use Pineda for Ethics, Reyes for CrimLaw, Bernas for Consti, Paras for Obli, and Salao for Intellectual Property. These are not just books. These are hard-bound books. Each of them probably weighs 3/4 kls. I carry them all three to four times a week. The carrying is a burden already. My back and shoulder ache. The study of law is indeed not only a mental but a physical endurance test as well.

But I have been wondering why publishing companies keep on producing hard-bound law books festooned with gold letterings on the spine? Wouldn’t it be cheaper if they are soft-bound? Is it in keeping with the seriousness and importance of the profession of law? Why not publish a law book with a cover similar to the Diary of a Wimpy Kid book?

2. Codal Book

In lieu of the hard-bound law books, other enterprising law students use something else lest they develop “a condition that affects especially older women and is characterized by decrease in bone mass with decreased density and enlargement of bone spaces producing porosity and fragility.” Our old neighbor calls that osteoporosis.

This tiny hard-bound book contains provisions only of the law, the codes. Hence, the term “codal.” It is still hard-bound but tiny nevertheless. It weighs much less than the annotated one. Of course, the apparent limitation of the codal book is that it has no annotations, which means that students have to rely purely on the text of the law.

3. Photocopied Supreme Court Cases

Lawyers who went to law school during the paleolithic era talk about the SCRA as their source of Supreme Court cases. Today’s law students talk about lawphil.net, Philippine Supreme Court online library, and other online sites. What are these cases for?

For starters, law professors assign cases to students. But not all professors do it for exactly the same reason. Some do it to show to the students how the Supreme Court, whose decisions become part of the law of the land, shed light on an otherwise vague provision of a law. Others do it to show to the students how the Supreme Court makes unclear what was formerly clear, or to show to the students how the Supreme Court sometimes got confused. Still others do it to get even—“Back then, our professor assigned Javellana vs. Executive Secretary to us, so I’m assigning it to you now.”

Yet the least thing a student can do is to comply. Complaints would only fall on deaf ears. That’s why they photocopy cases even if they have no plan of reading most of them, or even if professors do not get to discuss most of them.

4. Highlighter

I was never a fan of highlighter. I simply just don’t believe in it its power to help the student retain what he has read. But since I entered law school, the practice of using highlighter rubbed off on me. Yet I use it judiciously. And I am not very much particular about the color, but for the record, I’m using a pink Stabilo Boss highlighter.

But others seemed to have spent a great deal highlighting rather than reading and understanding the text. Open their books and one would begin to suspect if it’s really a law book one is holding or a coloring book. Hardly any text on a page is left un-highlighted.

Is there a proper way of using the highlighter? There's none. The best way is that which works for you. Sometimes I use it to highlight a word, a phrase, or an entire paragraph. Regardless of the amount of text I highlight, though, I do it because what I highlight is what I think is worth highlighting---and remembering.

5. Sign Pen

During our CrimLaw 1 Prelim Exam, I used an ordinary ballpen. When I passed my test booklet, my professor went over it, and asked me, “Didn’t I tell you to use a sign pen?”

“No, Sir,” I answered.

“Next time, you use a sign pen because it’s what you’ll use when you’ll take the Bar Exam.”