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Lonnie Hoffman

Civil Procedure

The following advice was anonymously contributed:

If you have your laptop up in class, make sure to have the Internet up and add www.dictionary.com to your favorites list. Ever the intellectual, Prof. L. Hoffman routinely spouts out words and entire phrases that led me to the dictionary and thesaurus. As a tip, Prof. Hoffman decides before class who he is going to call on for the day. He picks about 4 students and writes their names down on a post-it note. If you walk by the podium before class and look at his books, the post-it note is usually stuck to the books so you can see if you are on his hit list. Fortunately, even if you don't know that you are going to be called on, it isn't an imposing ordeal. Prof. L. Hoffman is rarely, if ever, rude or coarse over a comment or answer coming from a student. Generally, if the answer is off base he will ask for other comments, or "restate" the answer in a way that provides exactly what he was looking for.

Prof. L. Hoffman also discusses cases in great detail. Where Prof. Ragazzo may handle an entire case in 30 minutes, Prof. L. Hoffman may take a week on the same case. Be prepared to learn everything there is to know about Pennoyer v. Neff, International Shoe, Helicopteros, and Piper. Accordingly, you will have less reading for this class than some of your counterparts in other sections. From this, I found the best test preparation was to study the black letter law directly from the cases, and I didn't even bother with a commercial outline (thus, my outline has ALL of the studied cases broken down by subject matter in very short brief format).

Additionally, don't count on anything being a part of the final exam, or count on it appearing with relative proportionality to coverage in class. During the semester, we took 4-5 weeks to cover the topic of personal jurisdiction, yet it was a negligible portion of the final exam (and many didn't mention it at all). For our class, L. Hoffman may have reasoned that it was unnecessary since practice midterm covered only personal jurisdiction, but the point is that don't assume anything about his exams. Those that predicted questions invariably panicked when they didn't see what they expected.

A- Civil Procedure outline – Fall 2012 added 02-24-2013
Anonymous Civ Pro Outline – Fall 2012 – Grade A added 01-02-2013
Anonymous Civ Pro “Attack Outline” – Fall 2012 – Grade A added 01-02-2013
Anonymously contributed Procedure 1 Outline – Grade A and high grade in class, Fall 2010 added 02-14-2011
Anonymously contributed Civ Pro Outline - updated version of outline from this site
Anonymosuly contributed Procedure outline - 2008 - student received A grade
Anonymously Contributed A Outline, Civil Procedure, Fall 2007
Anonymously Contributed A Outline, Prof Lonnie Hoffman, Civil Procedure
Civil Procedure Outline, Lonnie Hoffman (thanks to Carl Galant)
Procedure Sheet and Procedure Sheet 2 (described as "highly condensed rules for Hoffman's Civ Pro Class) (thanks to Marcy Darsey).