Juristudents for Mac: Notetaking Tools Review

After using the law school note-taking/outlining software Juristudents for a few days, I'd say I'm going to stick to my tried and true OmniOutliner.

Note: Dave has already reviewed this product and I largely agree with everything he says.

More about Juristudents and some notes on other outliner options...

Positive:
Juristudents provides a great structure to help you record important information in an organized way so it will be meaningful to you later. The multi-pane working environment works well. When you open a class, you have a side pane called the "Course Outline" that includes "topics," cases, rules, and statutes, and a main pane for notes. Click on any topic or case or statute, you'll get the text you entered for that item. Creating a case brief is easy, and you can customize the blank brief template to eliminate repetitive typing. The default template prompts you for case name, citation, page in book, facts, issue, rules, rationale, and holding. I learned on my own to create these kinds of sections for a case brief, but it would have been a lot easier in my first year of school if I'd had something like this to remind of what to look for and to cut down on my work in taking it down.

Weaknesses:
The "Course Outline" pane is seriously lacking. Currently, the program does not allow you to move the notes and topics around in your "Course Outline." Or rather, the only way to do it is to copy the contents of an item, e.g., a case brief, then create a new item where you want to move the case, paste in the contents of the first item, then delete the original. This is cumbersome at best, a deal-breaker at worst. How many of us create outlines with such precision that we don't need to move things around? Not me. I move sections of notes all over the place all the time. Also, as I've been getting used to the software, I've ended up creating subtopics and case briefs under the wrong main topics simply because I didn't understand how the software worked—when you create a new item, it doesn't always show up where you want it or expect it. Now I need to go back and correct those errors, and that should be an easy process. Instead, it's quite time consuming.

I often find that I'm taking notes on topics and realize later that many of those topics fall under a larger umbrella topic. Without being able to move topics around easily in the "Course Outline," it's nearly impossible (a potentially massive amount of cutting, pasting, and renaming of topics is involved) to change the "level" of an item in an outline and add an umbrella topic.

What if you want to insert a subtopic between two other subtopics? You can't do it w/out, again, a ton of cutting, pasting, and renaming.

Bottom line: Moving items around in an outline should be fast, simple, and follow standard outliner conventions. Without that ability, the software is simply crippled. The model should be something like the mailboxes window in Mail, but even better would be to make the "Course Outline" behave more like a real outline (a la OmniOutliner), including "indent" and "outdent" commands. Also, the "Course Outline" feature should give you options on how to "auto-number" items in your outline, just as OmniOutliner does. OmniOutliner calls this "styles" and allows you to choose whether a topic heading begins with an A, a, 1, i, I, etc. You can specify these preferences by "level" in the outline, so that all top-level headings are A, B, C, second level are 1, 2, 3, etc. You an also speciify whether they're bold, italic, etc. Juristudents should give users this kind of flexibilty with its "Course Outline"—that's what an outline is all about, right?

One other deal-breaker for me: although it lets you export your outline, the exported file has zero indentation. All levels of your so-called "outline" are flush left. The exported file indicates different level headings via bolding and changing the size of the font, but the levels of the "outline" aren't indented as a regular outline would be. In other words, the software doesn't produce a real outline, even though it says it will. The ultimate for me would be if Juristudents could create an OPML file that I could then open in OmniOutliner or any other program that supports the format. The beauty of such a file is that you can expand and collapse levels with ease, allowing you to see as much or as little of your data as you wish. This is how I create outlines, and this is what I'd like a law school notetaking tool to help me do. The ability to see your entire 40-50 page outline collapsed to 1-2 pages of main headings or expanded to whatever level you'd like to see is great for studying around finals time. I've learned to take notes in such a way that what seems to be the most important information is in the top headings, with miscellaneous class discussion below in subheadings that I can just collapse (and largely ignore) when it comes to studying for an exam. Very handy.

Miscelleneous other drawbacks:

• Command-H should hide Juristudents; this is a standard command across all Mac apps. Instead, Command-H brings up a find/replace dialogue. Why?
• Command-C doesn't seem to work for "copy" in some of the fields, even though the Edit menu indicates it should.
• Case brief and statute titles should accept punctuation such as colons and commas. I like to put the entire case title and citation in the "title" of the case brief so that all that info will show up in the outline. You can do that with Juristudents, but not if you want to include a comma or colon.
• Typing in a large text field slows down the more text you type. It gets worse with different fonts, so that you may type a whole line of text and you'll only actually see what you've typed after a few seconds of lag. I've seen this a lot in newer, unpolished applications. I have no idea what causes it.

Final Suggestion:
A product like this is a great idea, but Juristudents still needs some work. I don't think most students create what I call "real" outlines; for most people who just use Word to create "outlines," this software may simplify the process and produce a product like that you're used to. It could definitely help first year students because it creates little informational spaces for you to fill, reminding you of the things you need to look for and helping to make sure you don't miss important bits. However, like a lot of new software, I'd say Juristudents needs to work out a few bugs before it'll be really worth the $50 its maker is asking.

Other Options:
There are several other good outliner/notetaking options for Mac users, including my favorite, OmniOutliner (with a complete version of the U.S. Constitution in outline form! see the "Sample Documents" download on this page). More feature-rich (but therefore more complicated) options include the closely-related Circus Ponies Notebook and Aqua Minds' NoteTaker. These programs apparently started from the same code base, so they are similar in lots of ways. I've spent more time with NoteBook and I really do like it; it's elegant and feature rich, but I've had difficult adapting to its outliner conventions—I just can't type notes as fast w/it as I can w/OmniOutliner. One cool thing NoteBook does that I'd like to see more programs do is it creates an automatic index for all the words you've entered anywhere in your notebook. This has potential to be a valuable study tool. For example, if you wanted to find every instance of "perpetuities," you can flip to the index and see each instance in context so you can quickly find the one you're looking for. Unfortunately, since the program indexes every single word, the index quickly gets large and rather unwieldy; it would be nice to be able to index only certain key words, but I don't think this is possible yet.

Finally, another info manager that many people rave about is DevonThink. I used this a great deal my first year in law school; it has a clipping service that makes it easy to copy text from the web into your DevonThink database, so I clipped all the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that I was going to be tested on into a database and had them at my fingertips in class and during finals. (NoteBook also has a similar clipping feature.)

As Dave mentioned in the comments to this post, Windows users might want to try Storelaw (he didn't like it) or Notemap.

See also: Outliners.com, "archives from the golden age of outliners."

Posted 01:01 PM | Comments (7) | law school mac geek

Quicksilver Saves Time

Thanks to 43 Folders, I just discovered Quicksilver, "An evolving framework for accessing and manipulating many forms of personal data." It's basically an OS X launcher app, but for me it appears to have advantages over others (like the ubiquitous Launchbar) in that it's free (I think) and it makes sense to me w/out a lot of configuration or setup. If you use a Mac, you might want to check it out.

Posted 11:41 AM | mac geek

Definition of Cute?

Ok, everybody go ooohhhaaaawwwww! (Note to those on dialup, this collection of images may take a while to load. For a quicker sample, see here, or here, or here, here, here, here, or here.)

Posted 04:28 PM | life generally

More Coolness This Weekend

In D.C. this weekend? Check out the D.C. Labor Film Festival at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring. I'm thinking "Take Out" (tomorrow at 3:15) looks pretty good, as do some of the others, but they're all $8.50/each, so I'm thinking I won't be seeing more than one or two.

Posted 10:54 AM | ai movies life generally

Mathematics, a veritable sorcerer

Class QOTD: "I know you're sophisticated law students, but you can still laugh like hell. He made up the statistics!" —Prof. Evidence Prof. Evidence was referring to People v. Collins, 550 F.2d 1036 (1968), known as "the probability case" because it discusses what's required to to establish that evidence of probability has been properly introduced and used by the prosecution in a criminal case. The court wrote:

"As we explain in detail infra, the testimony as to mathematical probability infected the case with fatal error and distorted the jury's traditional role of determining guilt or innocence according to long-standing rules. Mathematics, a veritable sorcerer in our computerized society, while assisting the trier of fact in the search for truth, must not cast a spell over him. We conclude that on the record before us defendant should not have had his guilt determined by the odds that he is entitled to a new trial."

Take that all you statisticians and numbers wonks! Your sorcery is not welcome here!

Posted 10:28 AM | Comments (1) | 2L law school

Coolness Coming Up

Lots of cool things (mostly bands) are coming to D.C. Like, for example, Snow Patrol will be here Friday for $15. It appears that tickets are still available. No one really raved about them when I was looking for summer Rawk!, but they keep coming up in places I hear about good music. So, would you go? Next, the Green Festival will be in D.C. next weekend (Sept. 18-19) at the D.C. Convention Center. It costs $10 for lots of cool speakers (Amy Goodman! Jim Hightower! Greg Palast! Barbara Ehrenreich! Naomi Klein! William Greider! And more!). Or, they're still looking for volunteers to help out, and if you give them four hours of help, you get a free all-access pass for the weekend (plus a t-shirt!). Back to the music, The Killers, who nearly topped my summer Rawk! list, will play the 9:30 Club Sunday, October 3rd, for only $12. I'd love to see that, but Sunday!? And then, crazy joy of joys, who knew Camper van Beethoven was back? Apparently, they are, and their new album, "New Roman Times," will be out Oct. 12, which is also the night they're playing, you guessed it, the 9:30 Club. For $20, it's a pricey show, but how worth it! And how is it possible not to love this—according to lead singer David Lowery, the new album is a rock opera!

"We didn't want to make it an overt comment on the current political climate, so we made up a fictional North America in which there's many different countries that fight each other every once in a while, and Texas has gone neo-fascist and California has had a civil war. The main character is a soldier from the Fundamentalist Christian Republic of Texas, and the songs follow this solider and other people through the story. But it's not really that serious—there's space aliens, and we blow up the disco at the end."

I'm so there! If you can't wait for the album, the iTMS (iTunes Music Store) has an exclusive 3-song EP (that link will open in iTunes), which Lowery describes (iTunes link) as:

our very Camper-esque way of talking about the deep gulf between one America best represented by the right wing fundamentalist Christians of the south and interior, and the more urbane elements of the coasts ... we hope this record is an amusing distraction in the coming political season.

Gotta love it. (Note: No purchase necessary, void where prohibited, please see your local dealer for complete details. All plans, either express or implied, mentioned herein are subject to change w/out notice, depending on the exigencies of law school. Bleh.)

Posted 06:54 AM | Comments (3) | ai music life generally

OB-GYNs Practice Love?

Hey look, tort reform with a bizarre new twist:

U.S. President George W. Bush offered an unexpected reason on Monday for cracking down on frivolous medical lawsuits: "Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."

But that's not all. Check out the video clip of the statement. Is it just me, or are Bush's hand gestures even more inappropriate than his choice of words?

Posted 06:40 AM | Comments (2) | election 2004

Juristudents

A good friend just sent me a link to Juristudents, a new cross-platform law school note-taking and outlining software package. Looks interesting. It competes with a similar package I've seen before from West or LSAC; I can't remember now what it was called and I can't seem to find any links to it anywhere. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? And does anyone use anything like this?

Posted 07:36 AM | Comments (6) | law school

Quotable Professors

Three great quotes from yesterday's classes: 1) "There are some places in our country where, if a police officer comes to your door and you don't run, you're a damn fool." —Prof. Evidence (talking about whether evidence that a defendant fled the police is relevant or probative of anything). 2) "This opinion is vapid, it will melt your brain." —Prof. Corps (in response to Simons v. Cogan, 549 A.2d 300 (Del. 1988); the good Prof. was making the point that the opinion's reasoning was circular. The opinion basically says that corps. owe a fiduciary duty to stockholders, but not to bondholders, but its answer for why was because "that's the way it is." Prof. Corps argued that the more logical reason for this difference is that the debt can "self-protect" by negotiating the terms of its loan via the terms of the bond. The stockholders don't have that option to negotiate a contract—their contract is the corp's charter, and it's non-negotiable—so stockholders get a fiduciary duty and voting rights.) 3) Bodies lying all over the place used to cause stock prices to plummet, but "you're inured to that now because you get to see Iraq on tv every day." Prof. Corps (Talking about Jedwab v. MGM Grand Hotels, Inc., 509 A.2d 584 (Del. Ch. 1986), which followed a big fire at an MGM hotel ("the worst disaster in Las Vegas history") that killed 84 people and caused MGM stock to tank. By this reasoning (that Americans today are inured to dead bodies and carnage from tragedies and war), a side benefit of the Iraq war to Bush's corporate friends is that they can now create lots more carnage (literally and figuratively) in their pursuit of profit w/out those activities damage their stock price too seriously. Great.)

Posted 07:16 AM | 2L

Welcome Labor!

Speaking of labor (and since yesterday was Labor Day, after all), a hearty welcome to the Labor Blog which its authors say is necessary because:

because we think what people do 8+ hours per day, 5+ days a week is where the fate of the nation and the world rests. When workers have power in the workplace, they end up with power in the political world, just as employers use power in the private economy to leverage privileges from the public sector.

I'll bet Justice Thomas is really going to enjoy reading this new blog! ;-) [link via the ACSblog]

Posted 11:53 AM | 2L

Reason to disagree w/Justice Thomas #32

Lechmere, Inc. v. NLRB, 502 U.S. 527 (1992): Justice Thomas goes to great lengths to repeat at least a dozen times the rule established (or rather, according to him, affirmed by this case). That rule is simply that "an employer cannot be compelled to allow distribution of union literature by nonemployee organizers on his property" except where "the location of a plant and the living quarters of the employees place the employees beyond the reach of reasonable union efforts to communicate with them." NLRB v. Babocock & Wilcox Co., 351 U.S. 105, 113 (1956). It's really a simple rule. A very bad rule (as the dissent by Justices White and Blackmun makes very clear), but it's simple, and could have been expressed once, with perhaps a few examples of the exception. Thomas provides the examples (which are as narrow as he can manage, including logging camps, mining camps, and mountain resort hotels), but he does so in a ponderous and pedantic way, apparently so he can repeat again and again that he's giving the finger to the union with this opinion. Respectfully, Justice Thomas, we get your point. Thanks.

Posted 09:44 AM | Comments (1) | 2L

Free Problems

I have just learned that stealing sharing a wireless internet connection with your neighbors (who either generously or naively leave their network visible and unprotected by any sort of encryption scheme) is all fun and games until something goes wrong and you can no longer connect to the internet, at which point the fun and games turn pretty unequivocally into the seventh level of hell. I have no idea what's gone wrong, but as of about 11 a.m. when I installed the latest and greatest Apple software update (the Airport Card Upgrade 3.4.3, I believe), I can't connect to the internet from home at all. My computer will connect to a network, but then it tells me that it has a "self-assigned IP address and can't connect to the internet." Great. Thanks. And worse, the computer doesn't even see the third network that was previously most reliable. Perhaps it's time to break down and pay for DSL... Oh, and since this issue really does appear to have been caused by, or is at least related to, an Apple software upgrade, all of you who have just been waiting to mock my Mac self-righteousness should feel free to do so now. ;-)

Posted 03:28 PM | Comments (14) | mac geek

Just a little cannibalism

Talking with my dad yesterday on the phone about law, law school, and humorous cases (he went to law school, too), he reminded me of the fascinating case of Alfred (or Alferd) Packer, the Colorado (or San Juan) Cannibal. That link will give you the short story, including the legend of the judge's sentencing:

The verdict was guilty, with death by hanging. The legend was that Judge Melville B. Gerry, on pronouncing sentencing said..."...There was siven Dimmycrats in Hinsdale County! But you, yah voracious, main-eatin son of a bitch, yah et five of them, therefor I sentence ye T' be hanged by the neck until y're dead, dead, dead!". This was probably not the exact statement made by the judge as he was a well educated man, but makes for good story-telling. Later the sentence was reduced to manslaughter and he was given 40 years to be served at the prison in Canon City.

A more detailed account of the case can be found here, and the Alfred Packer Collection of the Colorado State Archives offers great documentation of the case (including what appears to be the more official transcript of the judge's sentencing order). For a more entertaining account of this and other "wild west" 19th century true tales that are stranger than fiction, head for your local library to check out a copy of Timberline by Eugene Fowler, a pseudo-historical novel that the City of Denver website describes as:

A gossipy, not always true, account of the adolescence of The Denver Post, written with as much zest and a shade more accuracy than the former con-man Bonfils and former bartender Tammen ever mustered for their outrageously sensational (and profitable) newspaper.

The book is kind of hard to find these days, but it's worth the effort—an excellent read. In its wild stories of the way Bonfils and Tammens swindled everyone they knew (always w/the best of humor), I suppose the book also proves the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same... Ok, back to obscure issues of intellectual property...

Posted 10:10 AM | Comments (1) | life generally

Feeling Fall

Labor Day Weekend. Fall about to begin. This is the best time of the year, my favorite. I love the changing of the weather (that hasn't really begun too much here yet)—when the nights get cool and the days warm and crisp and sparkling sunny, with leaves turning and falling to the ground and the air smelling so fresh and clean w/out the smog (and humidity) of summer. It's wonderful. But it is also hard, because it means returning to school, to class, to reading, to taking notes, to juggling schedules in very different ways from the juggling that goes on for most working people. It's not worse or harder, it's just different, and the adjustment takes time. I have not yet adjusted. I've read about 30 pages of the roughly 200 or more I've been assigned so far, I have a "pre-emption check" due for the journal on Monday, I have a half dozen things to do for different student groups (the Equal Justice Foundation (EJF), the National Lawyer's Guild (NLG), and GW Law Democrats), and something really must be done about getting a budget around here before I wind up in the poorhouse. (Does anyone have any good recommendations for a simple but efficient Mac money manager?) So much to do, and all I want to do is go hiking. (Click "more" for a blow-by-blow of the weekend's festivities and some notes on nostalgia.) I have very little to complain about, though, having spent all day yesterday sightseeing and hanging out with some of my best and oldest friends who have been in town this weekend for a wedding. We enjoyed tapas on Friday night at Jaleo in Bethesda, followed by drinks at the Barking Dog (which I don't recommend—loud, young, and they served raw chicken tenders, which is always a bad thing and tends to outweigh other factors in determining the quality of a place). Yesterday included a nonconventional trip right past the mall—we almost religiously avoided monuments and "must-see" sights—to the peddle boats in the Tidal Basin. L. and I pedaled our little four-person craft and quickly became exhausted and soaked in sweat. The weather was warm, partly cloudy, and deathly calm, so out on the water we just sort of baked in the heat. Needless to say, our paddle was short, but we did get some nice views of the Jefferson Memorial. I recommend the paddle boats in later September or early October when the weather is much, much cooler. The paddle boat excursion was followed up by a drink at someplace on F street called "The American Grill" or something similarly uninspired (I don't recognize it on this list of DC cigar bars). It was decorated in a mountain cabin motif and it turns out it was a cigar bar, complete with banks of personal humidors where the regulars kept their private collections of stogies. When we asked for a table for four we were asked, "Are you aware that this is an all smoking establishment?" We weren't, but we didn't care all that much at that point? "Does that mean we're required to smoke?" I asked. The answer was no, and thankfully the place was pretty empty and no one else was smoking, so it was a nice place for a beer and a few minutes watching Michigan trounce Miami Ohio. After a terrific bottle of wine back at our humble abode, we dined at Meskerem, a great Ethiopian place on 18th Street where I learned that Ethiopian custom is for everyone to eat from the same plate because those who do so will never go to war against one another. It may not be true, but in case it is, I think we should definitely change the customs at all meetings of international bodies and political leaders. We migrated from there to the Brickskeller (because, since I first visited a couple of months ago no one will now be allowed to visit me in D.C. w/out having at least one drink at the Brickskeller!) where we were joined by another great old friend. That triggered a mini-high school reunion with all the rummaging around in the cupboards of the past that such things can involve. We moved the reunion on the Childe Harold in Dupont Circle, and finally to the Big Hunt (what a bad bad name for a bar!) for a shot of Goldschlager (don't ask, except that, ok, they were right, I was wrong, it is real gold!). Nothing like topping off the night with something both viscous and sparkly! But, and so, the work awaits. And I don't want to do it, though I know I must. While fall is a beautiful time to be alive, all the beauty (and probably also seeing old friends) reminds me of all that I'm missing in this world and in this life as I work my way toward a J.D. I'll spare you the ruminations, but suffice to say that two more years like the last year sound very very unappealing right now. It was beyond words wonderful seeing old friends and seeing them seem so happy with their lives and what they've done and become in the many years since I saw them last. But the experience also brought on a bit of nostalgia about the past and also raises all the old questions of What am I doing in law school? And why am I doing it? And is this really the life I want to be living? I don't have answers to those questions and I feel pretty well past the point where I can entertain them seriously, anyway. But spending the weekend w/non-law friends also gave me an idea of why there's a stereotype that lawyers are boring and that is that they typically work too hard on things that they can't really talk about because of confidentiality reasons, meaning that since they can't talk about their work, and their work is really all they do, lawyers seem very boring to people who aren't lawyers. It's just a theory. YMMV.

Posted 08:10 PM | Comments (3) | life generally