We refer to these study aids as "basic" not because of the complexity or difficulty of the content and presentation - indeed, some of these titles include the most comprehensive treatments of their subject matter available in study aid form - but due to their format. They are the closest to conventional textbooks and often directly adopt, with slight modification, the format of your required casebooks.
For this reason, while their comprehensiveness makes them easy to recommend to anyone regardless of personal preferences, students who've had a relatively easy time absorbing their assigned readings for class will find this style of study aid especially helpful.
The Understanding series is a long-running series of very comprehensive study aids that are often considered the baseline for law school study aid formats. This is because, out of all of the many commercial study aid series on the market, Understanding most closely resembles a traditional modern law school casebook, to the point that professors assigning Understanding as the actual textbook for a class is not unheard of.
Relative to other entries in this Basic Study Aids section, Understanding is very much a "middle of the road" title, covering its subjects in a great deal more depth than those series that market themselves on brevity but also not dwelling on repeated examples and sample questions the way some of the even longer ones do. The result is a series that most closely resembles a law school textbook, as mentioned, but with a focus on direct and comprehensive explanation of legal topics rather than the sort of opaque, "hide-the-ball" coverage through sample cases and discussion questions one is likely to see in a traditional law school casebook. Understanding is here to explain the law, not to teach you to think like a lawyer.
Examples and Explanations adopts the textbook-like structure common to all the Basic Study Aids but exhorts its authors to include whatever additional study tools they see fit, causing the final product to usually be significantly larger than any of the other Basic Study Aids, with the possible exception of Hornbooks. E&E titles will typically begin a section with a straightforward discussion of a topic like a reader would expect to find in any Basic Study Aid, but expands on that with a discussion of how the topic is likely to be approached in a law school classroom. As one could guess, this is intended more to support week-to-week class preparation, but it's quite nice for exam prep, as well: exam questions are often phrased in a way that directly calls back to class discussion earlier in the term, so E&E can help prepare a student to recognize what those questions are trying to do.
Likely the broadest and longest-running Study Aid series in American legal academia, Nutshells (or rather, In a Nutshell, to use the series' formal name) cover their material in as simple and lay-friendly terms as possible. They are literal pocket guides: they're printed in dimensions small enough to fit in one's pocket, and they're structured to be a quick reference to be read no more than a few pages at a time. Obviously this format doesn't lend itself to an incredibly deep treatment but Nutshells are famously useful for breaking down complex legal topics into about as simple an explanation as one is likely to find in the commercial study aid market, so they're a very useful reference on topics that you just don't get at all: the sort of concepts you read a half-dozen times in your casebook or your notes and simply don't click. A Nutshell won't get you to an A-level answer, but they'll often help you reframe the concept well enough to get over that initial hump.
The Hornbook series is, for all intents and purposes, the primogenitor of the law school study aid. They were originally conceived as supplements to popular casebooks: when a law professor's West-published casebook became sufficiently influential, West would solicit a Hornbook from them, which would essentially go through the casebook's material section by section and explain it in much greater detail, with numerous footnotes an illustrations. Ultimately, these "supplements" would become larger than the casebooks they were supporting and thus were marketed to law students as full-on companions to a given casebook. If you're assign Perillo on Contracts, for instance, would it not make sense to use a study aid authored by Perillo himself to further understand the material? Today, Hornbooks feel their age: the concept has been abstracted and iterated by multiple publishers for decades at this point so the Hornbook style can seem a bit antiquated and rooted in obsolete teaching methods. However, if you happen to be taking a class based on a casebook with a specific companion Hornbook, that can be a quick and tremendously helpful way to navigate the information.
Short & Happy is the newest series in this group, as you'll see from the comparatively few entries in the catalog link above relative to the other ones. It does, however, fill a useful niche: explaining a law school subject in the absolute simplest, briefest terms possible. Usually running at less than half the page length of the next-shortest Basic Study Aid series, Short & Happy is far more likely to give a reader a mnemonic device for remembering a rule than a cite to a case or statute. Obviously, this is not going to be a comprehensive source for your Exam studying, but like some other sources here it's useful for breaking down concepts you can't get your head around in the assigned work, and in a way the breeziness of the style makes them surprisingly great for last-minute cramming: while we would never suggest cramming as a serious exam prep strategy, if you absolutely must rely on some last minute superficial understanding of a topic you could do much, much worse than spend your limited time with this series.
Rather than the in-depth narrative explanations of a Basic Study Aid, a Commercial Outline will break the subject matter of a course down into narrow component parts, organize them as a tiered outline, and explain each section very briefly, frequently with only a paragraph or two. They're typically less effective for deep-dive comprehension throughout a term the way the Basics are, but can be extremely helpful towards the end when you're broadly satisfied with your general comprehension of a topic and are looking to tie everything together.
Black Letter is a good candidate for a "baseline" series among commercial outlines in that these titles don't particularly deviate from the model set out above. They're among the shortest of the major outline series - themselves substantially shorter than basic study aids - so fill their role as a last-minute synthesis tool quite admirably. Maybe most importantly for our purposes, they are among the most prolific of Outline series so we have Black Letter Outlines on a wide range of topics, including all first-year classes. Also, while most outlines will contain a "course capsule" at the beginning of every Outline further distilling the outline itself, Black Letter's are especially brief, boiling the title down to 25 pages or so. It's just about the most concise commercially-available restatement of a law school course.
Though the CULS Library doesn't have too many of them, the Gilbert Law Summaries are a long-running series of outlines that prioritize exhaustiveness over every other consideration. They rival the size of an Understanding or Examples & Explanations, which for an outline is pretty impressive. The explanations of topics are still a paragraph or less, but each Outline will have well over a thousand of these subtopics and multiple charts organizing them for comprehension. Also of note is a fairly robust sample exam question bank at the back of the book; we strongly encourage sample multiple choice questions as an exam preparation tool and believe students should attempt to take every practice exam they can get their hands on, so Gilbert is worth a look just for that.
Emanuel Law Outlines and 
Emanuel CrunchTime
Emanuel is a broad brand of Commercial Outlines, with a few series published under its umbrella tracking to the long- and short-form styles of outline explained above. The Law Outlines broadly track with Gilbert's scope, and CrunchTime has a lot in common with Black Letter. However, one thing the Emanuel series is known for is editorializing about what are likely to be the most important concepts on a law school test; the Emanuel brand more thoroughly embraces its role as a last-minute study aid for multiple choice/essay exams specifically.
Interestingly, while both these series contain sample questions, the CrunchTime series contains quite a few more than the Law Outlines despite its smaller size. This is not to criticize Law Outlines; the series is great and often the most in-depth outline on its subject, but the paucity of sample questions feels like a missed opportunity.
Practice Multiple Choice series are pretty self-explanatory: they're an extended bank of multiple choice questions similar to what one would find on a law school exam. The CULS Library has only pursued a few of these series but more exist, and are available in our online Study Aid Databases.
Q&A is a long-running series of sample exam question compilations on a wide variety of common law school subjects. It is among the library's most commonly-recommended study guides, as taking practice questions is almost always the most direct and practical form of preparation one can take -not only in advance of an exam but even to test one's comprehension throughout the term. Each guide features hundreds of sample questions, with full explanations of the correct and incorrect answers.
The Emanuel Bar Review Series is one of several Bar Exam study guides on the market, but stands out as the most significant one not produced to supplement a formal commercial bar review course: companies like Kaplan and BarBri produce their own study guides but obviously they're intended to be used in conjunction with the actual courses they teach. Emanuel stands on its own with no need of further context. While the focus is obviously review for the Multistate Bar and Professional Responsibility Exams, those tests are all multiple choice questions, so these resources offer a wealth of opportunity for law school exam prep as well. Note that this preparation is, of course, limited to the MBE subjects - Civ Pro, Con Law, Contracts, Crim Law and Pro, Evidence, Property, and Torts - but the scope of their questions is truly exhaustive. Also, the MPRE study guide is pretty much the only source of sample questions you're likely to find on Ethics and Professional Responsibility: since Professional Responsibility has traditionally taught to a specific test (the MPRE) more than any other required law school class, a practice question compilation that was NOT explicitly focused on the MPRE would be redundant.
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