Tulane first year law student Desirae Peters started preparing for 1L year immediately following her college graduation in May 2008 when she proudly purchased her very first hornbook, “Law School Confidential”. Once she read about the famous five color highlighting scheme for briefing cases, she couldn’t wait to get started on that first case in August. For those not privy to the deep secrets shared in this book, the “suggested” method involves highlighting in green for facts, yellow for the holding and procedural posture, orange for legal reasoning, purple for dissent and blue for court, judge, date and precedent cited.
According to several eye witnesses, the method flat out saved Ms. Peters from an unexpected line of questioning on the dissent’s rationale in week two of Contracts from the legendary Professor Smith. Then halfway through the semester, she flat out rocked her Torts midterm, receiving a surprise A- that she attributes entirely to her ability to specifically recall the yellow text in her casebook – the holding – photographically during the exam. Somewhere after that, however, the motto of “highlight sparingly” started to fade from her memory and the whole system got out of control.
Always looking to over-achieve and appear more organized to her section mates, Desirae’s started adding colors; first, it was light blue for dicta, and then it was red for topics she thought the professor would reference in the final. Before she knew it, her case textbooks began to resemble a child’s coloring book. By November, without even thinking through the consequences, she added black for passages addressed during class and brown for the topics the professor did end up addressing during class.
Unfortunately, finals have not been kind to Ms. ROYGBIV. Her idea to print out and highlight her class notes using this same nine color scheme proved costly as highlighter fading caused her to mistake the original blue precedent for light blue dicta during her Civ. Pro exam. Yikes. Then during her Torts final she ended up running out of time on the last essay because she spent too much time highlighting the questions. When she left her Criminal Law exam covered in tears and marker stains, other Tulane students began to wonder if maybe Ms. Peters spent too much time sniffing her highlighters this semester.
After this experience, Ms. Peters decided to sell her copy of “Law School Confidential” back to Tulane’s bookstore. Unfortunately they wouldn’t accept it – too many highlighted pages.
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