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  • Welcome To Open Legal Education

    Learn about the Law and the Practice of Law

    Self-paced learning activities to boost your knowledge of law and law practice. Work through exercises and get the results and feedback right away.

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  • The Best Lessons For Learning The Law

    Used by hundreds of thousands of law students over the past 40+ years

    Learning is a life-long journey and learning about the law and how lawyers work can be an important part of that journey.

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  • Unlock The Power of The Law

    CALI Lessons are the key to understanding law and law practice

    Learn the law using the same tools used by law students and faculty.

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    Gimme Shelter - Patti and the Tenant Blues

    This lesson discusses the 4 different types of leasehold estates and some of the rights and duties of landlords and tenants. It is written for the legal major, prelaw, business law and paralegal student.

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    Hey it's not my fault! - Defenses to negligence

    This is an introductory lesson about the defenses to a negligence action for the undergraduate legal studies, prelaw, business law and paralegal student.

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    Damages in Intentional Tort Cases - How to ask for what you want

    This lesson is for the legal studies, prelaw, business law or paralegal major and discusses the types of damages in intentional torts.

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    Torts II - The Torts of Defamation, Invasion of Privacy and Torts against Business and Property

    This is Part II of a 2 part series on Intentional torts written for the undergraduate legal studies, business law, paralegal or pre-law student.

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    Intentional Torts I - Hey - Leave me alone, Buddy!

    This lesson will instruct you on the basics of intentional torts. The lesson is written specifically for the undergraduate pre-law student, legal studies, or paralegal student. 

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    The 4 Cs of Contracts - Part 2 - Consideration and Complies with the Law and/or Public Policy

    This is Part 2 of a beginning lesson on contracts. It covers the last 2 elements: consideration and complies with the law and/or public policy. This lesson is written for the legal studies, prelaw, paralegal or business law student.

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    The 4 Cs of Contracts - Part 1 - Consent and Capacity

    This is Part 1 of a beginning lesson on Contracts for the legal studies, business law, prelaw or paralegal student. It discusses the first 2 Cs of any Contract: Consent and Capacity.

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    Negligence - When is an accident someone's fault?

    This is an introductory lesson about the tort of negligence and the elements which must be present. It is written for the undergraduate prelaw, legal studies, business law or paralegal student.

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    Semester Self-Assessment & Reflection

    This lesson is designed to help you self-assess your semester performance. It is best suited for completion after you finish a full law school semester. It begins with a brief overview of self-regulated learning and metacognition.

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    How to Learn from Exams

    This lesson explores one of the fundamental lawyering skills, which is self assessment. This lesson looks at how to learn from success and failures.

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    Assessing Your Own Work

    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.

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    Mindfulness Practice for Law School

    Law school creates a competitive environment with significantly more work than most undergraduate programs. The new expectations and environment increases anxiety and stress for many students.

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    Grit, Growth, and Why it matters. Or, how to be gritty!

    This lesson will teach you what grit and growth mindset are, and why they are important for learning and mastering success, specifically as they pertain to law school.

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    Mechanics of Memorization

    This lesson provides memorization tools and techniques for exam success. First, the lesson demonstrates the relationship between memorization and exam success. Next, the lesson explains memorization tools and techniques.

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    Multiple-Choice Questions: Wrong Answer Pathology

    This 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.

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    A Methodical Approach to Improve Multiple Choice Performance

    This 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.

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    Analysis 2: The "A" in IRAC: Application and Analysis

    First-year law students often understand the law and know the right conclusion, but struggle to apply the law thoroughly in order to maximize their scores.

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    Hyped About Hypos

    Law students often hear about the importance of "doing hypos" but don't know why they are important, where to find them, how to do them, and so on.

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    Issue Spotting

    This lesson explores one of the fundamental lawyering skills, which is to be able to spot issues. This lesson looks at what an issue is, and best practices in spotting them in cases, with clients, and on exams.

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    Reading Comprehension Strategies for Exams

    In this lesson, we will provide some steps you can follow to improve your reading comprehension.

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    Creating Study Aids

    Creating Study Aids is part of the Academic Support series of CALI Lessons. This lesson introduces you to law school study aids. It begins with a brief overview of self-regulated learning and Bloom's learning taxonomy.

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    IRAC

    This lesson will cover the basic structure of written legal analysis: IRAC. IRAC stands for Issue, Rule, Application/Analysis, Conclusion. There are slightly different versions of IRAC which may be used for different legal documents.

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    Outlining Basics

    This lesson teaches you why, when and how to create outlines when preparing for your law school exams.

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    Attacking Exams

    This lesson will teach you the best ways to prepare for exams, and the best ways to organize your response on the day of your exam.

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    Legal Writing v. Exam Writing

    This lesson explains some key differences between legal writing and exam writing. First, the lesson demonstrates the relationship between legal writing and exam writing.

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    Study Groups: Best Practices

    This lesson gives best practices on whether and how to form a law school study group.

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    Help! I am Zoning Out!

    This lesson is designed to provide students with data about why their attention levels may dip during class or studying, including recent research regarding the effects of digital distractions on concentration.

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    Secrets to Improved Memorization

    Final exams require recalling information from over 14 weeks of the semester. This lesson provides insight on how to remember the vast information from class to apply on final exams.

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    Note-Taking in Law School 101: Case-Based Content

    This lesson, intended for incoming and current 1L law students, guides participants through the process of note-taking in law school classes with a focus on case-based information.

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    Note-Taking in Law School 101: The Basics

    This lesson will walk you through things to consider before setting "foot" (physically or virtually!) in a law school doctrinal classroom.

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    Introduction to Rule Synthesis

    In law school, students are expected to read multiple cases to identify rules that will be applied on exams.

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    Finding The Rule

    The lesson introduces several common rule structures and tests recognition of each. The lesson challenges the student to recognize the rule of law as it appears in several cases.

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    Excavating Facts from Cases

    This lesson will discuss ways to identify the legally significant facts within cases using pre-reading strategies.

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    Case Briefing

    This lesson focuses on case briefing. The lesson will guide students through cases identifying the most important part of cases to prepare for classes.

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    Preparing for Class 101: Preparing for Your First Day of Class

    This lesson will run through critical considerations to think about before stepping into the law school classroom, or the "theater of learning" for the first time!

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    Law School Resources

    Law school will consume your life during the three or four years that you are enrolled. But that doesn’t mean that life stops. Bills still have to be paid; people still get sick; the rest of the world keeps rolling on.

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    Don't Compartmentalize! Transfer is the Key to Law School Success

    One of the best ways to learn and remember something is to connect it to something that you already know.

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    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 perfor

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    Words Matter

    You may have heard that lawyers are precise. It’s true. In law school, you will spend a lot of time discussing the meaning of a singular word or placement of a comma.

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    Time Management: Creating Your Plan

    This lesson provides time management strategies for law students.

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    Analysis 1: Thinking Like a Lawyer

    This lesson explores one of the fundamental lawyering skills, which is to think like a lawyer, or analyze. Students will go through basic analysis exercises, so they can master this technique prior to writing exams.

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    Common Law Basics: What Faculty May Assume You Know

    A basic introduction (or refresher!) about sources of law, court structure, and precedent.

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    A Good Place To Start ... Depends On Where You Are Beginning!

    Whether you are new to law school or have made it through a few semesters, there are always ways to improve your process and performance.

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