ABA-approved law school
The American Bar Association accredits the school. Many jurisdictions build their education-eligibility rules around that one status.
Open the Admission guide →Bar Exam Glossary
The language of the bar exam, translated.
Search exam components, NextGen formats, admission requirements, study methods, scoring, portability, writing, and assessment terms without wading through unexplained acronyms. The 210 terms are grouped into 22 categories: Admission, Study, Writing, Doctrine, NextGen, Exam, Assessment, Legacy UBE, Scores, Extended doctrine, MPRE, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law, Evidence, Property, Torts, Business Associations, Family Law, LSAT, Law School. Each entry is a plain-language definition, not a substitute for the controlling rule or statute where one applies to your jurisdiction or administration. Search by term or browse by category, and follow the link on any calculation-linked entry through to the tool that actually computes it, so a definition never has to stand alone.
| Category | Terms |
|---|---|
| Admission | 12 |
| Study | 9 |
| Writing | 5 |
| Doctrine | 1 |
| NextGen | 6 |
| Exam | 7 |
| Assessment | 6 |
| Legacy UBE | 4 |
| Scores | 9 |
| Extended doctrine | 10 |
| MPRE | 6 |
| Civil Procedure | 19 |
| Constitutional Law | 15 |
| Contracts | 12 |
| Criminal Law | 14 |
| Evidence | 11 |
| Property | 10 |
| Torts | 12 |
| Business Associations | 6 |
| Family Law | 4 |
| LSAT | 14 |
| Law School | 18 |
Active recall
Recall means production, not recognition. You try to produce the rule, element list, or answer from memory before you ever look it up.
Open the Study guide →Admission on motion
No new bar exam is required. An already-licensed lawyer is admitted on motion instead, based on practice history and the receiving jurisdiction's other conditions.
Open the Admission guide →Analytic rubric
Scoring is broken into separate dimensions. An analytic rubric grades issue coverage, rule accuracy, fact analysis, organization, judgment, and completion one at a time instead of as a single overall impression.
Open the Writing guide →Applicant portal
Every filing runs through one login. The applicant portal handles documents, messages, status updates, fees, and the later admission steps in a single online system.
Open the Admission guide →Attack outline
Attack outlines exist for retrieval, not learning. They compress an entire subject's issues and rules into a framework fast enough to scan under timed conditions.
Open the Study guide →Bar admission agency
One authority per state. That court, board, office, or committee handles exam applications and attorney admission for the whole jurisdiction.
Open the Admission guide →Bar review
Bar review is the structured course a candidate follows before the exam, covering doctrine, writing, and the other admission milestones the jurisdiction requires along the way.
Open the Study guide →Black-letter law
Black-letter law states the rule plainly. Stating it correctly is only step one. Applying it still needs its conditions, exceptions, and jurisdictional context.
Open the study guide →Character and fitness
Passing the exam is not the whole test. A separate character-and-fitness inquiry asks whether the applicant meets the jurisdiction's professional standards at all.
Open the Admission guide →Constructed response
The candidate writes the answer instead of picking one. NextGen leans on this format heavily: short written responses, medium ones, and longer performance tasks all use it.
Open the NextGen guide →Content scope
NCBE publishes the boundary in advance. Content scope names exactly which subjects, concepts, and skills are eligible for testing on a given examination.
Open the scope map guide →Diagnostic
A diagnostic is a starting snapshot, not a scored exam. Rule knowledge, application, writing, timing, and completion each get identified as already strong or still weak.
Open the Study guide →Discrimination index
Some questions separate strong performers cleanly; others do not. The discrimination index is the statistic that measures how well a single item does that job, and it feeds into responsible item review.
Open the methodology guide →Distractor
A distractor is wrong on purpose, never randomly. Candidates who make one specific, predictable rule, fact, or reasoning error are exactly who it's built to fool.
Open the methodology guide →Exam administration
Each sitting of the exam gets its own name, usually a month and a year. Content and policy can shift from one administration to the next, so the label matters.
Open the scope map guide →Exam blueprint
Nothing on the exam appears by accident. A blueprint allocates the content, skills, task types, and relative weight given to each section in advance.
Open the scope map guide →Experimental item
Not every item on the exam counts. An experimental item is unscored, used only for research or future development, and its treatment stays entirely under the examining organization's control.
Open the methodology guide →Foundational concepts and principles
NextGen does not always hand you the law. Foundational concepts and principles are the doctrine you are expected to already know when the task withholds it.
Open the NextGen guide →Foundational lawyering skills
NextGen names seven skill categories, not one. Research, writing, analysis, investigation, advising, negotiation, and client relationship management each get tested on their own terms.
Open the NextGen guide →Integrated question set
One client file can generate many questions. An integrated question set groups selected and constructed responses that all draw on the same scenario, file, or legal resources.
Open the NextGen guide →Interleaving
Studying one subject at a time feels safe. It is also a little dishonest. Interleaving mixes subjects and problem types on purpose, so the learner has to identify the governing issue instead of reading it off a chapter heading.
Open the Study guide →Issue map
Before writing a word, a strong answer needs a map. An issue map lays out the legal questions, elements, subissues, and relationships in the order the response has to address them.
Open the Writing guide →Item analysis
Every question gets reviewed after it runs. Item analysis checks difficulty, discrimination, timing, omission rates, and which distractor candidates actually picked.
Open the methodology guide →J.D.
J.D. stands for Juris Doctor. Law schools in the United States award it as the standard first professional law degree.
Open the Admission guide →Jurisdiction
Every state, district, and territory runs its own admission process. A jurisdiction is simply whichever one of those authorities is setting the eligibility rules you're reading.
Open the Admission guide →Legacy UBE
Three components make up the legacy UBE: the MBE, the MEE, and the MPT. The whole format is scheduled to sunset after the February 2028 administration.
Open the Legacy UBE guide →LL.M.
LL.M. stands for Master of Laws, a postgraduate degree. It can support a foreign-education eligibility route, but only when the jurisdiction's own requirements are actually satisfied.
Open the Admission guide →Local-law component
A uniform score never covers everything. The local-law component is the separate course, exam, or prerequisite a jurisdiction layers on top of it.
Open the Admission guide →MEE
MEE stands for Multistate Essay Examination, the six-question written component of the legacy UBE.
Open the Legacy UBE guide →MBE
MBE stands for Multistate Bar Examination, the 200-question multiple-choice component of the legacy UBE.
Open the Legacy UBE guide →Minimum passing score
Every jurisdiction sets its own floor. The minimum passing score is whatever that jurisdiction currently requires for the applicable exam or transfer route.
Open the results guide →Model answer
A model answer teaches; it does not dictate. It illustrates strong issue coverage and analysis, but plenty of differently worded answers pass just as well.
Open the Writing guide →MPRE
MPRE stands for Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination. Most jurisdictions require it as a separate ethics exam, apart from the bar exam itself.
Open the Admission guide →MPT
MPT stands for Multistate Performance Test, the closed-universe performance component of the legacy UBE, tested with every fact and rule supplied.
Open the Legacy UBE guide →NCBE
NCBE is the National Conference of Bar Examiners. One organization develops the UBE, NextGen UBE, MBE, MEE, MPT, and MPRE, and publishes admission information for all of them.
Open the scope map guide →NextGen UBE
NextGen UBE runs nine hours, longer than its predecessor. It replaces the legacy format with stand-alone multiple choice, integrated question sets, and performance tasks.
Open the NextGen guide →Norm-referenced scaling
A raw score means nothing on its own. Norm-referenced scaling is the statistical process that connects it to the reported score scale. Do not invent your own conversion from a practice percentage.
Open the results guide →Performance task
No memorized law here. A performance task is a realistic beginning-lawyer assignment, completed entirely from the facts and legal resources supplied with it.
Open the Writing guide →Point sheet
A point sheet is a checklist. Trainers and evaluators use it to score a written response's issue coverage and analysis, though the official scoring materials themselves stay under the examiner's own rights and terms.
Open the Writing guide →Portability
A score does not have to die at the state line. Portability is the ability to carry it into another participating jurisdiction, under that jurisdiction's own policies.
Open the results guide →Raw score
A raw score is the number before any adjustment: unscaled credit only, earned before the official statistical conversion or combination happens.
Open the results guide →Released question
A released question has been let out on purpose. Secure, unreleased exam content is a different thing entirely, made available only under the owner's stated access and use conditions where it applies.
Open the methodology guide →Remediation
First you diagnose why performance failed. Remediation is the targeted repair that follows: a rule lesson, a boundary drill, a rewrite, or a pacing block, matched to the actual cause.
Open the Study guide →Retrieval practice
The goal is access, not recognition. Retrieval practice is repeated, spaced, and mixed recall effort, done without looking, until memory holds up under real exam conditions.
Open the Study guide →Scaled score
A scaled score is not a percentage you can eyeball. The examining organization's own scoring process produces this figure, and only its official report counts.
Open the results guide →Score age
Old scores can expire. Score age is the maximum time a receiving jurisdiction will allow between the exam date and a transfer or admission application built on that score.
Open the results guide →Score transfer
A qualifying score does not automatically follow you. Score transfer is the actual application to use it in a receiving jurisdiction, alongside every other admission condition that jurisdiction still requires.
Open the results guide →Selected response
No writing here. A selected response is answered simply by choosing one or more of the options already provided.
Open the methodology guide →Simulation
A simulation withholds feedback on purpose: timed practice built to approximate one component, a half day, or a full official examination as closely as possible.
Open the Study guide →Sourcebook
A sourcebook teaches the tested law directly. NCBE publishes official NextGen sourcebooks of its own, available under NCBE's own access terms.
Open the NextGen guide →Spaced repetition
Timing is the whole idea. Spaced repetition schedules retrieval at increasing intervals, so a rule comes back near the point you'd otherwise forget it instead of being crammed once and left alone.
Open the Study guide →Subject-matter outline
Not every outline is official. A subject-matter outline is the published description of doctrine actually eligible for testing, a different document from any commercial study outline.
Open the scope map guide →Testing accommodations
Access has to be requested and approved, not assumed. Testing accommodations are the modifications a jurisdiction grants to a qualified examinee, through its own process and documentation rules.
Open the Admission guide →UBE
UBE stands for Uniform Bar Examination. During the transition, context alone tells you whether a given reference means the legacy version or the NextGen successor.
Open the scope map guide →UBE local component
A uniform exam is rarely the entire requirement. The UBE local component is whatever separate, jurisdiction-specific piece a state layers alongside the exam or a score transfer.
Open the Admission guide →UBE score transfer
Moving a uniform score across state lines is not automatic. UBE score transfer depends on the exam version, the score's age, candidate eligibility, and whatever local rules the receiving state adds.
Open the results guide →Written-component scaling
Written answers are graded locally, state by state. Written-component scaling is the official process that combines or converts that local grading into one reportable score on the legacy UBE.
Open the results guide →Anti-lapse statute
A gift does not always die with the beneficiary. An anti-lapse statute can substitute that beneficiary's own descendants in their place, when the statute's protected-class conditions are met, instead of letting the testamentary gift lapse: a rule most jurisdictions limit to close relatives of the testator, so a lapsed gift to an unrelated friend or a distant acquaintance still falls into the residue or passes by intestacy rather than to anyone that friend might have named as their own heir.
Open the extended doctrine library →Choice-of-law rule
A case can touch several states at once. A choice-of-law rule is the forum's own tool for picking which jurisdiction's substantive law actually governs the issue.
Open the extended doctrine library →Confirmed in writing
Verbal consent is not always enough. Confirmed in writing means the client's informed consent was either given in a writing or promptly documented by the lawyer in one, exactly as the applicable rule defines it.
Open the MPRE guide →Direct adversity
Direct adversity is the sharpest version of a conflict. It arises when representing one current client is directly adverse to another current client, not merely uncomfortable for them.
Open the MPRE guide →Domicile
A domicile is more than an address. It requires physical presence plus intent to remain indefinitely, and once acquired it continues until a new one genuinely replaces it.
Open the extended doctrine library →Imputed conflict
One lawyer's conflict does not always stay with just that lawyer. An imputed conflict spreads it to the rest of the firm, subject to the rule's own exceptions and screening provisions.
Open the MPRE guide →Informed consent
Consent has to be earned, not just obtained. Informed consent requires adequate information and explanation first, covering the material risks and any reasonably available alternatives.
Open the MPRE guide →Lien creditor
Timing decides everything for a lien creditor. It acquires its lien by attachment, levy, or a similar legal process, and exactly when that happens can determine priority over a competing security interest. An unperfected security interest generally loses to a lien creditor who gets there first, which is exactly why a secured party that delays filing or taking possession is taking on real risk it could otherwise have avoided entirely for the cost of a single timely filing.
Open the extended doctrine library →PMSI
PMSI stands for purchase-money security interest. The value behind it actually enables the debtor to acquire the collateral, which is exactly why special priority rules attach to it. A properly perfected PMSI in ordinary goods can leapfrog an earlier-filed general security interest under the right circumstances, an exception to the usual first-to-file rule that exists specifically so a new lender financing a specific purchase isn't blocked by whatever blanket lien already covers everything the debtor owns.
Open the extended doctrine library →Screen
A screen has to go up early to work at all. It isolates the conflicted lawyer from the matter, its information, and sometimes fee participation, along with whatever notice or certification the applicable rule requires.
Open the MPRE guide →Supplied law
Nothing here needs to be memorized. Supplied law is the statutes, cases, rules, or other legal resources handed to you inside the exam task itself, meant to be used, not recalled.
Open the scope map guide →Trust account
Client money never mixes with the lawyer's own. A trust account holds client or third-person funds in a segregated account, exactly as professional-conduct and jurisdiction rules require.
Open the MPRE guide →Personal jurisdiction
A court needs power over the defendant. General jurisdiction reaches a defendant who is at home in the forum. Specific jurisdiction requires the defendant's own purposeful forum contact and a claim arising from it.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Subject-matter jurisdiction
This is power over the case type. Federal courts require a specific statutory basis, most often federal-question or diversity jurisdiction, or the case does not belong there at all.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Diversity jurisdiction
No plaintiff can share a state with any defendant. Diversity jurisdiction also requires an amount in controversy over $75,000, measured at the time the complaint is filed, not later.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Federal-question jurisdiction
The federal issue must appear on the complaint's own face. A defendant's anticipated federal defense does not count, no matter how certain it is to come up later in the case.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Venue
Jurisdiction asks whether a court can hear the case. Venue asks whether this particular courthouse is the right one, proper where a defendant resides or where a substantial part of the underlying events occurred.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Removal
Only a defendant can remove a case. Removal moves a case from state court to federal court, and only when the case could have originally been filed there in the first place.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Erie doctrine
A federal court in diversity is not a different court. It applies federal procedural law but forum-state substantive law, so the outcome does not turn on which courthouse the case landed in.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Joinder
One lawsuit can hold more than one claim. Rules governing joinder ask whether the claims share a transaction or occurrence and a common question, and every joined claim still needs its own jurisdictional basis.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Class action
Named plaintiffs sue on behalf of a larger group. Certification requires numerosity, common questions, typical claims, and adequate representation, plus one qualifying category for how the class will actually be managed.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Discovery
Each side can demand what the other side knows. Discovery reaches anything nonprivileged and relevant to a claim or defense, proportional to the case, not everything either party might find merely interesting.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Work-product doctrine
Trial preparation is not free for the other side. Ordinary work product can be discovered only on a showing of substantial need and undue hardship, and a lawyer's mental impressions get even stronger protection.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Summary judgment
Summary judgment says no real dispute exists. It is granted only when the record shows no genuine dispute of material fact and the moving party wins as a matter of law on the undisputed facts.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Judgment as a matter of law
A verdict needs some real evidence behind it. The motion is available only after a party has been fully heard on that issue, and it does not let the judge weigh credibility.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Claim preclusion
One lawsuit gets one chance at everything. A valid final judgment on the merits bars a later suit on claims that arise from the same transaction and were, or could have been, raised.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Issue preclusion
A decided issue generally stays decided. It applies only when the issue was essential to the earlier judgment and the party against whom it is used had a full and fair chance to litigate it.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Interpleader
A stakeholder does not have to guess who is right. Interpleader lets that party hand a disputed fund to the court and let the rival claimants fight it out between themselves instead.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Impleader
A defendant can bring in someone else. Impleader is derivative liability, brought in because that third party might owe the defendant money if the defendant loses, not a way to blame them alone.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Supplemental jurisdiction
One claim's power can reach a related one. A federal court with jurisdiction over one claim can often hear a closely related claim too, though a statute limits that reach in diversity-only cases.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Forum non conveniens
Even the right court can decline a case. Dismissal on this ground requires an adequate alternative forum elsewhere and a real imbalance of private and public interests pointing away from the chosen court.
Open the Civil Procedure guide →Standing
A plaintiff needs a real personal stake. Standing requires a concrete and particularized injury, caused by the defendant, that a favorable ruling could actually redress, not just a strong opinion about the law.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Ripeness
A dispute can arrive too early. A case is not ripe when the harm is speculative or contingent on events that have not yet happened and might never happen at all.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Mootness
A dispute can also arrive too late. A live controversy that has already been fully resolved, with no ongoing effect and no exception for repetition, is generally moot and gets dismissed rather than decided.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Commerce Clause
Congress can regulate interstate commerce broadly. It reaches channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and activity that substantially affects it in the aggregate, though purely local noneconomic activity needs a much stronger link.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Dormant Commerce Clause
States cannot wall off their own markets. A state law that discriminates against interstate commerce is highly suspect, even without any federal statute in the picture at all.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Procedural due process
Government owes notice before it takes something. How much process is due scales with the private interest, the risk of an erroneous deprivation, and the government's own competing burden.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Substantive due process
Some liberties survive any fair procedure. A law burdening a fundamental right gets strict scrutiny; most everything else gets only rational-basis review.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Equal protection
Not every classification needs the same justification. Race and national origin draw strict scrutiny, sex draws intermediate scrutiny, and most everything else only needs a rational basis.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Strict scrutiny
This is the hardest test a law can face. The government must show a compelling interest and narrow tailoring, and most laws reviewed this way do not survive it.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Rational basis review
This is the easiest test a law can face. The challenger must show the law is not rationally related to any legitimate interest, and courts often imagine a justification the legislature never stated.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →State action doctrine
The Constitution restrains government, not private citizens. Private conduct becomes state action only in narrow circumstances, such as a traditionally exclusive public function or deep entanglement with the government.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Content-based restriction
Some speech laws turn on what is said. Content-based restrictions on protected speech generally face strict scrutiny, and viewpoint discrimination within them is treated even more harshly still.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Establishment Clause
Government cannot officially endorse a religion. Courts scrutinize whether a law's purpose and effect favor religion, coerce belief, or excessively entangle government with religious institutions.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Free Exercise Clause
People have a right to practice their faith. A neutral, generally applicable law usually survives a free-exercise challenge, but a law that specifically targets religious conduct does not.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Takings Clause
Government can take property, but not for free. Just compensation is required for a physical taking and, in narrower circumstances, for a regulation that goes far enough to functionally take the property's value.
Open the Constitutional Law guide →Offer
An offer is a real commitment, not small talk. It is objective and definite, communicated to someone with the power to accept it and actually form a contract.
Open the Contracts guide →Acceptance
Acceptance must match the invited method. Under the mailbox rule, a properly dispatched acceptance is effective the moment it is sent, not when the other side finally receives it.
Open the Contracts guide →Consideration
A promise alone is not enforceable. Consideration requires a genuine bargained-for exchange of legal value, and a promise to do something you already owed usually does not count.
Open the Contracts guide →Promissory estoppel
Sometimes there is a promise, not a bargain. Promissory estoppel can enforce a promise someone reasonably relied on to their detriment, when relief is otherwise the only way to avoid injustice.
Open the Contracts guide →Statute of frauds
Some contracts need more than a handshake. Contracts for an interest in land, one that cannot be performed within a year, and the sale of goods over a set amount generally need a signed writing.
Open the Contracts guide →Parol evidence rule
A final written deal blocks outside contradictions. Earlier or contemporaneous outside statements cannot contradict it, though the rule does not block evidence of a later modification or of fraud in forming the agreement.
Open the Contracts guide →Unconscionability
A contract can be too one-sided to enforce. Courts generally look for both an unfair bargaining process and unreasonably harsh terms before finding unconscionability at all.
Open the Contracts guide →Anticipatory repudiation
No one has to wait for the actual breach. A clear, unequivocal refusal lets the non-breaching party treat the contract as broken immediately, though it can sometimes still be retracted.
Open the Contracts guide →Material breach
Not every broken promise excuses performance. A material breach goes to the heart of the deal and can excuse the other side's performance; a minor breach usually just supports damages instead.
Open the Contracts guide →Expectation damages
Contract damages protect the deal you bargained for. Expectation damages put the injured party in the position performance would have created, not better, subject to foreseeability, certainty, and a duty to mitigate.
Open the Contracts guide →Specific performance
Money is the default remedy, not an order to perform. Specific performance is available only when money damages are inadequate, most commonly in contracts for land or a truly unique item.
Open the Contracts guide →Third-party beneficiary
Some people were never a party, yet still matter. An intended beneficiary can enforce a contract once their rights vest; someone who merely benefits incidentally cannot enforce it at all.
Open the Contracts guide →Mens rea
A guilty act alone is rarely enough. Mens rea is the required mental state, and it can range from purposeful conduct down to ordinary negligence depending on the crime charged.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Felony murder
A felony killing can be murder without intent. Most jurisdictions limit the rule to inherently dangerous felonies and cut it off once the felony has clearly ended.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Larceny
Larceny punishes a wrongful taking, not a keeping. It requires a trespassory taking and carrying away of someone else's personal property with intent to permanently deprive them of it.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Burglary
Burglary was about a dangerous nighttime entry. It requires breaking and entering a dwelling of another at night with intent to commit a felony once inside.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Conspiracy
Conspiracy punishes the agreement itself. Most jurisdictions require an agreement between two or more people, intent to achieve the criminal objective, and at least one overt act toward it.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Attempt
Wanting to commit a crime is not enough. Attempt requires specific intent to commit the target crime plus a substantial step that goes beyond mere preparation for it.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Accomplice liability
Helping someone commit a crime can be enough. Liability generally requires intentionally aiding or encouraging the principal, and mere presence at the scene, without more, is not sufficient.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Self-defense
A non-aggressor can meet force with force. Deadly force is justified only against a threat of death or serious bodily harm, never merely to protect property.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Insanity defense
A defendant can lack the capacity for guilt. The tests vary by jurisdiction, but most turn on whether a mental disease left the defendant unable to understand the act or that it was wrong.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Exclusionary rule
Illegally obtained evidence usually cannot be used. The rule exists to deter police misconduct, not to compensate the specific defendant for the specific violation that occurred.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Fruit of the poisonous tree
A derivative does not become clean evidence. Evidence derived from an earlier constitutional violation is generally excluded too, unless an exception like independent source or inevitable discovery applies.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Probable cause
A hunch is never quite enough. Probable cause requires a reasonable basis, under the totality of the circumstances, to believe a crime has been committed or evidence will be found.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Exigent circumstances
A real emergency can excuse the warrant. It applies when there is a genuine emergency, such as an imminent risk of harm, escape, or the destruction of evidence.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Double jeopardy
One sovereign gets one real shot. Jeopardy attaches once a jury is sworn, and it generally bars a second prosecution for the same offense by the same sovereign after that.
Open the Criminal Law guide →Relevance
Evidence need not prove the whole case alone. It is relevant if it has any tendency to make a fact that matters to the case more or less probable than it would be without it.
Open the Evidence guide →Rule 403 balancing
Relevant evidence is not automatically admitted. A judge can still exclude it when its probative value is substantially outweighed by unfair prejudice, confusion, or a waste of time.
Open the Evidence guide →Character evidence
General character usually cannot prove this act. The rules carve out narrow exceptions, including a criminal defendant's own choice to put a pertinent trait at issue first.
Open the Evidence guide →Hearsay
Hearsay is an out-of-court statement offered for its truth. A statement offered for some other reason, like showing its effect on the listener, is not hearsay at all.
Open the Evidence guide →Present sense impression
Timing alone can make a statement reliable. A statement made while perceiving an event, or immediately after, is excepted from hearsay for exactly that closeness in time.
Open the Evidence guide →Excited utterance
A shock can knock out the capacity to lie. A statement made under that stress, relating to the event, is excepted from hearsay for the same reason a present sense impression is.
Open the Evidence guide →Business records exception
Routine records are treated as reliable. A record kept in the ordinary course of a regularly conducted activity can skip the hearsay rule if made at or near the time by someone with knowledge.
Open the Evidence guide →Impeachment
A witness's credibility is always fair game. A prior inconsistent statement, bias, or a relevant conviction can all be used to attack how much a jury should believe them.
Open the Evidence guide →Attorney-client privilege
Legal-advice communications stay confidential. The privilege belongs to the client and can be waived, but the underlying facts discussed do not become privileged just because they were mentioned to a lawyer.
Open the Evidence guide →Authentication
An item must be shown to be genuine. Authentication only requires enough evidence for a reasonable juror to make that finding, not conclusive proof of it.
Open the Evidence guide →Best evidence rule
Proving a writing's content needs the original. A witness who simply saw the underlying event can still testify from personal knowledge without ever producing a recording of it.
Open the Evidence guide →Fee simple absolute
This estate never expires on its own. It is the largest estate the law recognizes, freely transferable, and inheritable with no conditions attached to it at all.
Open the Property guide →Life estate
A life estate ends when the life does. Whoever holds it afterward, by reversion or remainder, is entitled to the property the moment the measuring life ends.
Open the Property guide →Rule against perpetuities
A future interest cannot hang forever. It fails, at common law, unless it is certain to vest, if at all, no later than 21 years after some life in being when it was created.
Open the Property guide →Joint tenancy
Survivorship is built into this ownership. Selling one owner's share during life severs the joint tenancy as to that share, turning it into a tenancy in common instead.
Open the Property guide →Adverse possession
Long enough possession can become title. Most jurisdictions require possession that is open and notorious, exclusive, hostile, and continuous for a set statutory period before it ripens.
Open the Property guide →Recording acts
Buying land alone guarantees nothing. Under a notice statute, a later good-faith purchaser can still prevail over an earlier, unrecorded interest they did not know about.
Open the Property guide →Easement
An easement is a right to use, not to own. It can be created by an express grant, necessity, or long, open, and continuous use under a claim of right.
Open the Property guide →Fee simple determinable
This estate ends the instant its condition hits. The original owner is left with a possibility of reverter that takes effect automatically once the durational condition is triggered.
Open the Property guide →Implied warranty of habitability
A lease promises more than four walls. The premises must be fit for basic human habitation, and a serious, uncured defect can support rent withholding after proper notice.
Open the Property guide →Mortgage foreclosure
Foreclosure wipes out junior interests, not senior ones. Senior interests generally survive it, and a buyer at that sale takes the property subject to whatever senior lien was never eliminated.
Open the Property guide →Negligence
Negligence is falling short of reasonable care. A plaintiff must prove duty, breach, causation, and actual damages, and missing any one of the four defeats the whole claim.
Open the Torts guide →Duty of care
Negligence starts with an owed duty. Ordinarily that duty runs to anyone foreseeably endangered by the defendant's own conduct, not to the whole world at large.
Open the Torts guide →Proximate cause
Not every real cause creates liability. Proximate cause limits liability to harm within the general kind of risk that made the conduct negligent, cutting off truly unforeseeable results.
Open the Torts guide →Res ipsa loquitur
Sometimes the accident speaks for itself. When the instrumentality was in the defendant's exclusive control, a jury may infer breach from an accident that does not normally happen without negligence.
Open the Torts guide →Comparative negligence
A careless plaintiff no longer loses everything. Comparative negligence instead reduces the plaintiff's recovery by their own percentage of fault, rather than barring recovery outright.
Open the Torts guide →Battery
Battery needs no intent to injure. It only requires intent to cause harmful or offensive contact, and the contact that actually results, even if unexpectedly severe, is still battery.
Open the Torts guide →Assault
Assault protects against fear, not just contact. It requires an intentional act creating a reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact, whether or not any contact ever happens.
Open the Torts guide →False imprisonment
A locked door is not the only way. It requires an intentional confinement to a bounded area, without a reasonable known means of escape, and without consent.
Open the Torts guide →Intentional infliction of emotional distress
Ordinary insults do not qualify here. It requires extreme and outrageous conduct, intended or reckless as to causing severe emotional distress, that actually causes it.
Open the Torts guide →Strict products liability
No carelessness proof is required here. A commercial seller is strictly liable for a manufacturing, design, or warning defect that existed at distribution and caused harm during foreseeable use.
Open the Torts guide →Defamation
Defamation must actually be false. It requires a false defamatory statement of fact about the plaintiff, published to a third person, with the required level of fault.
Open the Torts guide →Vicarious liability
An employer can answer for an employee's tort. Liability generally attaches when the tort happens within the scope of employment, not while the employee is off on a personal errand.
Open the Torts guide →Agency
No contract is needed to form agency. It forms when a principal manifests assent that someone act on the principal's behalf, subject to the principal's control, and that person agrees.
Open the Business Associations guide →Respondeat superior
This puts vicarious liability at work. Under it, an employer answers for an employee's torts committed within the scope of employment, not for purely personal conduct.
Open the Business Associations guide →Piercing the corporate veil
A corporate shield can fail. A court can pierce it when the owner dominated the corporation and used it to commit a fraud or a fundamental injustice.
Open the Business Associations guide →Business judgment rule
Courts do not second-guess every bad outcome. The rule presumes a director acted on an informed basis, in good faith, and honestly believing the action served the company's best interest.
Open the Business Associations guide →Duty of loyalty
Fiduciaries cannot quietly favor themselves. Self-dealing transactions can still survive if properly disclosed and approved, or shown to be fair to the company on their own terms.
Open the Business Associations guide →Derivative suit
A shareholder can sue for the corporation. Recovery in a derivative suit belongs to the corporation itself, not to the individual shareholder who actually brought the case.
Open the Business Associations guide →Best interests standard
Custody protects the child, not either parent. The standard weighs factors like safety, stability, and each parent's caregiving capacity, without an automatic preference for either one.
Open the Family Law guide →Equitable distribution
Not every state splits property evenly. Equitable distribution divides marital property fairly based on statutory factors, which can produce an unequal split even though it is not community property.
Open the Family Law guide →UCCJEA
Two states cannot both claim custody power. This uniform act generally gives initial jurisdiction to the child's home state, defined by six months of residence with a parent right before the case starts.
Open the Family Law guide →Termination of parental rights
Courts treat this as the most serious step. It requires a specific statutory ground, like abandonment or unfitness, proven to a heightened standard, plus a finding that termination serves the child's welfare.
Open the Family Law guide →Perfection
Attachment alone only protects against the debtor. Perfection is the extra step, usually filing, possession, or control, that protects the secured party against competing third-party claims too.
Open the extended doctrine library →Intestate succession
The state writes the will you skipped. Intestate succession distributes the estate by statute, typically to a surviving spouse and descendants first, then more distant relatives.
Open the extended doctrine library →Testamentary capacity
A will needs less capacity than a contract. It only requires understanding that you are making a will, knowing generally what you own, and knowing who would naturally be expected to inherit it.
Open the extended doctrine library →Undue influence
Someone else's will can replace the testator's own. It requires influence strong enough to overcome free agency, that actually produced a disposition the testator would not otherwise have made.
Open the extended doctrine library →Spendthrift trust
Some beneficiaries need protection from themselves. A valid spendthrift provision blocks both voluntary transfer and most creditors' claims against the beneficiary's interest before it is actually distributed.
Open the extended doctrine library →Logical Reasoning
Half the LSAT's scored questions live here. Two 35-minute sections test whether you can find an argument's assumption, flaw, or valid inference.
Open the LSAT guide →LSAT Reading Comprehension
One section, four passages. The section tests main point, structure, and how the passage would apply to a new situation, including one comparative pair.
Open the LSAT guide →LSAT Argumentative Writing
Unscored, but not optional. LSAC holds your entire score until a completed writing sample is on file.
Open the LSAT guide →Analytical Reasoning (Logic Games)
Logic Games is gone now. LSAC removed the section in August 2024 after an ADA settlement, replacing it with a second Logical Reasoning section.
Open the LSAT guide →LSAT percentile
A raw score means little alone. LSAC recalculates percentiles from the trailing three testing years, so the same scaled score can shift slightly over time.
Open the LSAT guide →Score preview
You can see a score before it counts. LSAC's Score Preview lets a test taker view their result and still cancel it, though a canceled preview still counts against retake limits.
Open the LSAT guide →LSAT variable section
One section never counts. LSAC tests future questions on real test takers here, without saying which section it is, so every section gets full effort.
Open the LSAT guide →Comparative reading
Two short passages replace one long one. Questions then ask how the pair agrees, disagrees, or responds to the same issue from different angles.
Open the LSAT guide →1L
Your first year sets the foundation. Nearly every school teaches the same six or seven core courses through case-method reading and cold-call discussion.
Open the Law School guide →Case brief
Your cheat sheet for cold calls. A brief condenses a judicial opinion into facts, procedural history, issue, holding, and reasoning you can reference fast.
Open the Law School guide →IRAC
Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion. The four-part structure organizes legal analysis on both law school exams and, in an adapted form, the bar exam itself.
Open the Law School guide →Cold calling
Professors call on students without warning. Cold calling simulates thinking on your feet in practice, which is exactly why arriving with a case brief matters.
Open the Law School guide →Grading curve
One exam can decide your grade. Most schools grade a single anonymous final against a mandatory curve, so a strong semester doesn't guarantee a strong grade.
Open the Law School guide →Law review write-on
Membership usually isn't an application. Most schools staff their journals through a timed write-on competition testing analysis, citation, and editing under pressure.
Open the Law School guide →OCI
Big firms recruit here first. On-campus interviewing routes students to summer-associate interviews through the school's career office, though it isn't the only hiring path.
Open the Law School guide →Judicial clerkship
Clerks work for a judge, not a firm. Most federal positions are applied for through OSCAR, a centralized system with a coordinated national hiring timeline.
Open the judicial clerkship guide →Credential Assembly Service (CAS)
LSAC assembles your file once. The service combines your transcripts, letters of recommendation, and LSAT score into one report sent to every school you apply to.
Open the Law School guide →Personal statement (law school)
Your numbers are standardized. Your personal statement is the one component fully in your control, showing judgment and writing ability a transcript can't.
Open the Law School guide →ABA Standard 509
Every accredited school discloses the same data. Admissions, cost, bar passage, and employment outcomes all follow one required format built for direct comparison.
Open the Law School guide →Addendum (application)
Explain here, don't confess. A short, factual addendum addresses a specific weakness like a low grade or a gap, kept separate from your personal statement.
Open the Law School guide →Necessary assumption
The argument needs this to work at all. Negate it, and the whole argument falls apart — that's the test for spotting one.
Open the LSAT guide →Sufficient assumption
This closes the gap completely. Add it as a premise, and the conclusion follows with certainty, no further help required.
Open the LSAT guide →Negation Test
Flip the choice, then re-check the argument. If negating an answer breaks the argument, that answer was a necessary assumption; if the argument survives, it wasn't.
Open the LSAT guide →Flaw question (LSAT)
Name the error, don't just find one. The correct choice matches the argument's specific logical mistake in the abstract, not merely its subject matter.
Open the LSAT guide →Parallel reasoning
Strip the topic away first. Two arguments about completely different subjects can share the exact same logical skeleton, and that skeleton is what the question actually tests.
Open the LSAT guide →Resolve-the-discrepancy question
Two true facts, one apparent conflict. The correct answer lets both stand by supplying a missing factor, never by denying either fact.
Open the LSAT guide →1L curve
One exam can outweigh a semester. Most schools grade first-year finals against a fixed distribution of grades, not against an absolute standard.
Open the Law School guide →Blind grading
Your name never touches the exam. An assigned number keeps the professor's grading blind to identity until final grades are already recorded.
Open the Law School guide →OSCAR (clerkship system)
One system, every federal judge. Applicants search open clerkship positions, submit applications, and route recommendation letters through this centralized portal.
Open the judicial clerkship guide →Letter of continued interest
A waitlist offer isn't a decision yet. This short letter confirms you'd enroll if admitted and adds any genuine update since you applied.
Open the Law School guide →Law school waitlist
Neither an admission nor a rejection. Movement happens late in the cycle, once a school sees how many admitted students actually enroll.
Open the Law School guide →Reach, target, and likely schools
Your own numbers set the category. A reach school's median sits above your LSAT and GPA; a likely school's 75th percentile sits below them.
Open the Law School guide →