Studying law: remember cases and articles, without neglecting the writing

More than you think when you arrive in L1 (the first year of the licence, France's bachelor's degree). In civil law, administrative law, constitutional law or criminal law, you have to remember:

• Articles: their number and their content, for example Article 1240 of the Civil Code (formerly Article 1382) on liability for one's own acts.
• Court decisions: the court, the date, the essential facts and above all the contribution to the law.
• Precise definitions, which the grader expects word for word, or nearly.
• Conditions and legal regimes: the conditions for liability, the criteria of a public service.

All of this lends itself perfectly to flashcards.

A classic case brief contains the facts, the procedure, the legal issue, the ruling and its significance. As flashcards, you split it into several short cards, each asking a single question.

Also make the card in the other direction: “Which decision established the presumption of liability for the custodian of a thing?” That is often how the question comes up in an exam paper: you have the idea, you need the reference.

Cloze deletion is ideal. It keeps the exact wording of the article while asking you for a single element:

• “Article 1103 of the Civil Code: contracts that are lawfully formed take the place of [law] for those who have made them.”
• “Any act whatever of man which causes damage to another obliges the one by whose fault it occurred to [compensate] it.” (Article 1240)

Remember to note the old numbering when there is one: many of the decisions you study cite the old articles, renumbered by the 2016 reform of contract law.

No, and it has to be said clearly. Cards serve memorization. They will not teach you to build an essay, solve a case problem or write a case commentary. Those exercises require written practice, with corrections.

What cards do is free up time and headspace for that writing. When the Blanco decision and its significance come to you instantly, you spend your three hours of exam on the reasoning and the outline, not on digging through your memory. A good split looks like this:

• Every day: the day's cards, fifteen to thirty minutes.
• Every week: at least one timed written exercise, whether an essay, a case problem or a commentary.
• After each tutorial session correction: the references you forgot become cards.

Tutorial sessions (TD) set the pace of the semester. Each TD worksheet lists decisions and documents: make the matching cards during the week, before the session. You will arrive at the TD already knowing the decisions, and the session will serve to understand their logic.

For the end-of-semester exams, start from the date of each exam and work backward. Keep the last weeks for past papers and written exercises, not for discovering chapters. Our exam study planner template helps you build it. And to understand why studying a little every day works better, read our page on spaced repetition.

If you are aiming for the CRFPA entrance exam (the gateway to French bar school) after your master's degree, the cards you started in your bachelor's years keep their value. The law of obligations, procedure and the landmark decisions do not disappear from the syllabus. A deck maintained over several years, corrected with each reform, becomes a solid foundation for your preparation.

• Organize your courses and TD worksheets as PDFs by year, semester and subject. Highlight the reasoning of the decisions and comment on key passages.
• Create front-and-back cards for the decisions and cloze deletions for the articles.
• Let FSRS decide the day each card comes back.
• Import your timetable as an .ics file, add your exam dates, and let the planner spread the load over the remaining days.
• Before the exam, review the subject's decks together and take a self-test graded out of 20.

Mnemesia is free, needs no account and works offline. Download it or read how it replaces Anki and Notion.