Law School Examples & Explanations
The list below contains all of the Examples and Explanations books that Law Book List recommends. The E&Es are a staple of law school study aids. If this is your first year of law school, I would recommend reading the list specifically for 1Ls. Alternately, if you are just looking for study aids in general, you can see the full list here. This list is only the E&Es, and some of the other series are also quite good.
For those who are not familiar with the Examples & Explanations series, they are a great help in law school. I found them useful every year, but they were especially indispensible during my first year. They have a section for each major topic a course covers. You can skip any sections that were not covered in your course. Each section is split in two parts. The first part is a short summary of the law. It focuses on high-level stuff and most of them do a good job of identifying the things that you are most likely to need to know on an exam. Each professor, of course, emphasizes slightly different things and has a little bit different spin, but the information in the E&E is pretty much always going to be applicable. The second part is a series of short answer questions. They provide a pretty good idea of what types of things you will be asked in the exam. Of course, your exam may not be in short answer format, but the points the questions hit will likely come up. The book also contains an answer for each question.
My approach was to read the questions, and if I immediately knew what the answer was, I would jot down a few notes and then check it. It is important to jot those notes down because if you just keep it in your head, a lot of time, when you read the answer you kind of unconsciously revise what you were thinking of to match the answer in the book. If you take some brief notes, you'll catch the gaps in your understanding of the issue more easily. Then, if the answer didn't seem immediately obvious to me, I would type out a full answer. Some of the questions could be reasonably approached in different ways, so if your answer doesn't exactly match the answer in the book, that is not necessarily a problem, but is usually worth giving some thought to.
If you see one that is missing that you think is useful, please post it in the comments and I will add it.
Examples and Explanations:
Updated December 2015