CALI has created a pretty fun and easy-to-play game to help you learn the names and a little bit about the voting tendencies of the Supreme Court Justices.

There are actually two types of games within the game. In one match the Justices' names with the Justices' likenesses. In the other choose from a list of thee cases the one for which a given Justice wrote the opinion.

Link:
Supreme Court Justices Game

Accepted Admissions Almanac reports on the upcoming changes that will take place starting on the June 2007 LSAT exam. Here's some nice analysis on the upcoming.

Some good analysis in this article on insidehighered.com. I find it interesting that two of the major LSAT prep companies are offering opposite advice. These quotes are taken from the above article:

Kaplan's advice:

• "[I]f they are taking it in the next year or so, they should, if they have time to prepare, take it in December or February. Anytime there is uncertainty in the exam, regardless of the magnitude, it should be avoided if you have the opportunity,” said Steven Marietti, director of pre-law programs at Kaplan."

Princeton Review's advice:

• “I think June is a better time to take the exam, in terms of how it fits into the admissions cycle,” Meanza added. “I don’t think that it’s ultimately that big of a deal — I don’t think we need to scare students into doing something just because of two minor changes.”

Kaplan's advice makes a lot of sense to me. In a test that you are (hopefully) going to prepare for extensively and where the cost of a single wrong answer is fairly high, it makes sense to avoid as much uncertainty as possible. But then again, it doesn't make much sense to rearrange a plan you've had in place based on what looks like a very minor change.

I guess it depends on how flexible you are and how comfortable you are with bumping up your LSAT test date to an earlier date.

Elmer, CALI's Director of Internet Development, just created a great google-powered search engine of law schools' official sites on learnthelaw.org. All 188 ABA law schools' sites, and only those sites, are included in the search results.

This could be really helpful if you only want search results from schools' official websites. Especially for pre-law students looking to compare a number of law schools in some way. For example, if you wish to compare the clinical offerings of various law schools and do not want a bunch of irrelevent links that a normal Google search would likely give, using this search would be a great place to start. Give it a try!

A couple of blogs have recently posted some good tips for specific parts of a law school application.

University of Chicago's "A Day in the Life" blog has a two part post (here and here) on letters of recommendation. I remember when I was applying to law school I looked at the letters of rec as more of a formality. I just gave the forms and nothing else to the three professors I knew the most and asked them to write a letter of recommendation. That was the extent of it. I read this and realized that was a bad way to go about it. I highly recommend reading those two posts before you start asking for letters of recommendation.

Also, Accepted.com's blog has some tips on writing a personal statement to accompany your law school application. Mostly basic grammatical suggestions, but the post is still a good reminder.

If Harvard Law School has its way, law school curriculum may no longer be older than the substance pictured to the left. Here is an article on Harvard Law School's change in 1L curriculum.

Harvard is cutting down on the amount of time first year students spend on the traditional 1L classes. Instead it is focusing on what it considers some more up-to-date and practical aspects of law.

What does this mean for you?
You're probably not going to Harvard (if you are, congratulations!). But this move by Harvard might be important to you as a pre-law student. You may or may not know that Harvard is considered the most prestigious law school in the country. And law schools love to follow the leader.

This move by Harvard may push a number of other schools in the same direction. It should be interesting to see if Harvard's change in the 1L curriculum causes a domino effect.

And while it likely won't be as well-publicized as Harvard's changes, keep an eye on your potential schools and see if they adopt similar curricular changes in the future, especially if you're still more than a year or two away from law school.

Update: Another article with more insight on the change (linked from Leiter's Law School Reports).

Every year the Princeton Review puts out a ranking of the top ten law schools with the most competitive students (requires free username/password). I have no idea how accurate the rankings are or if they even mean anything, but they are out there. I've talked about competition in law school before.

You'll notice that no really elite law schools are in this list. This reinforces last week's answer to the reader submitted question where a reader asked about going to a lower reputational school with the idea of transferring. My thought is that lower reputational schools can be the most competitive because the difference in opportunities for people in the top of the class are so much better in terms of transferring and getting a job out of school. So with so much fighting to get to the top, you just can't go to a school with the idea that you'll have high enough grades to transfer upward.

Also I find it interesting that Baylor issued a press release touting their top ranking. I'm not sure that that top ranking in this category is necessarily a good thing. The rankings probably scares a some potential Baylor students bringing to mind horror stories with students at each other's throats, sabotaging others' work, unwilling to share notes, hiding important research books others will need in the library, etc.

I doubt that kind of competition happens much anywhere. But to me, law schools are competitive by nature for other reasons and I can't imagine that much differentiation between two student bodies of any given similarly positioned schools. Plus, again, who knows if these rankings really mean anything anyway.

Learnthelaw.org previously offered only one subscription option for incoming law students who wished to gain early access to CALI lessons: a year long, $50 subscription.

We are pleased to announce that learnthelaw.org now offers a new subscription option: $10 for unlimited access to CALI lessons through learnthelaw.org for 30 days!

You can sign up through learnthelaw.org here.

For more on CALI lessons as law school preparation click here.