Commonly Used 1L Resources   Tags: 1l resources, 1l support, bibliographies, blogs, electronic resources, how-to-guides, incoming students, law school terminology, practice-ready resources, quick reference cards, specialized research guides, tutorials, user guides, videos, websites  

Welcome to the Charlotte School of Law - we're glad you're here!  We've enlisted the help of our rising 2Ls in developing this guide, specifically designed for our incoming 1L class.  Here's what you have to look forward to during your first year of law school...

1L subject matter consists of Torts, or personal claims; Civil Procedure, a rules based class which teaches you how to proceed through the civil court systems; Contracts; Property; Criminal Law; and LP (aka Lawyering Processing), which is the legal research/writing component of the 1L year.

Each of these classes usually assigns nearly a hundred pages of reading for each week - this also entails doing case briefs and making sure you understand the material before class actually starts. To give you a picture of how much time it would take if you were to give the work a good-faith effort then it would typically take around 7 hours to complete the readings and everything for each class - this totals to about 35-40 hours, at the bare minimum, of reading for classes each week.

Oh, I almost forgot about LP.  Not only is there reading, but there are plenty of exercises that you will have to do each week and a paper due just about every month. All in all, the amount of time I invested into LP each week was about 2 hours - at least when there was no paper due that week.  When a paper was due, that time would greatly increase.

Also, please note that these times do not include the amount of time I was in class for each class each week.  That was about fifteen additional hours.

I wanted to give you an idea of that so I could give you an understanding of the time constraints this puts on a student. Because of this constraint a lot of the sources that our professors say we should check out typically go untouched. It takes a unique person to be able to do ALL the work that is assigned without any sort of shortcut.

~ Matt Froelich, Charlotte Law JD Student ~

Enter this LibGuide - filled to the brim with tips, tricks and resources hand selected by Charlotte Law students to help you survive your first year in law school!