Study aids are not a substitute for doing the hard work yourself because working with the material, even when it is difficult, is essential to understanding. Often, reading a study aid may be all that's needed to pull together all of the work you've done. It can be like the proverbial light bulb going off in your head after you've read someone else's explanation of the material. Study aids can be especially useful to double-check your understanding of the material as you prepare your course outlines. Hornbooks One of the best study aids is a hornbook.
Hornbooks are treatises in the subject matter.
They explain the legal concepts and black letter law the way a non-fiction book or textbook would. Hornbooks are more like your undergraduate scholarly texts, except more scholarly and more detailed. However, they can be quite illuminating if you cannot pull the legal concepts out of the cases and the class discussions.