How to Take Notes in Law School

Your notes are raw material for an outline, and your outline is the thing you use to write exam answers. Nothing you write in September has value on its own. Judge every note by one question: will this help me state a rule, spot an issue, or resolve a close call under time pressure in December?

That test kills most of what students write down. The procedural posture of a 1934 negligence case is rarely useful. The professor's three-part formulation of the duty inquiry, and the two hypotheticals she used to show where the second element breaks down, are extremely useful. Write with the exam in view from week one and you will cut your note volume roughly in half without losing anything.

Write short briefs — under half a page — and write them by hand or in a document you can see next to the casebook. A usable brief contains the procedural posture (who is appealing what), the legally relevant facts only, the issue framed as a legal question, the holding, the rule the court announces or applies, and the court's reasoning in one or two sentences. Add a line for dissents and concurrences when the professor assigned them; casebook editors rarely include them by accident.

The rule line is the one that matters. For Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co., 248 N.Y. 339 (1928), the useful note is that duty runs only to plaintiffs within the foreseeable zone of danger, plus a note that Andrews's dissent treats the question as proximate cause instead. For International Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310 (1945), it is that a nonresident defendant must have minimum contacts with the forum such that suit does not offend traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice. Write the rule in a form you could drop into an exam answer.

Many students switch to book briefing by October: highlighting the casebook in a fixed color scheme (facts, issue, holding, reasoning) and writing only the rule and one reaction in the margin. That is fine once you can reliably answer a cold call. Do not switch in week two; you need the reps of full briefing to learn what a holding is.

You already have the case. Class notes should capture what class adds: the professor's own statement of the rule, hypotheticals and their answers, the relationship between today's case and the last three, and any signal about what she thinks is unsettled or wrong.

Develop a small set of flags you use consistently — a symbol for a hypothetical, one for an explicit rule statement, one for something you did not understand. When a professor says 'so the test is,' 'the majority rule is,' 'note the split,' or 'that's a question for the exam,' write it down verbatim and mark it. Those sentences become the black-letter spine of your outline.

Hypotheticals are the highest-value item in the room and the most commonly botched note. Record the facts of the hypo in one line, the call, and the answer the class reached, including why. A hypo without its resolution is worthless in November. If the professor never resolves it, write 'unresolved' and bring it to office hours.

Also record the questions you could not answer. A running list of confusions, dated, is the fastest office-hours agenda you will ever build.

There is no consensus, and either works if you refuse to transcribe. Mueller and Oppenheimer's 2014 study in Psychological Science found longhand note-takers outperformed laptop users on conceptual questions and attributed the gap to longhand's forced summarizing; a 2019 replication effort by Morehead, Dunlosky, and Kiewra failed to reproduce the main effects. The defensible reading is that processing, not the tool, drives learning.

Handwriting has a built-in advantage: you physically cannot keep up, so you must decide what matters. If you type, you have to impose that constraint yourself. Practical compromises that work: type but cap yourself at one screen per class hour; type in an outline structure with the day's doctrine as headings so you cannot free-write; or take notes by hand and type only the professor's rule statements.

Separately, laptops distract. Carter, Greenberg, and Walker's 2017 study of West Point economics classes found lower final exam scores in sections where computers were permitted. If you keep your laptop, turn off notifications and close the browser. If you cannot, that is information about which tool you should use.

Set a weekly appointment — two hours, same time every week — to fold that week's class notes and briefs into your course outline. Do not wait until reading period. Outlining is where you discover that you never understood the difference between general and specific personal jurisdiction, and you want that discovery in week six, not week thirteen.

Structure the outline by doctrine, using the syllabus or table of contents as the skeleton, not by date or by case. Under each doctrinal heading, put the rule first in your own words, then the elements or factors, then a one-line case tag for each case that illustrates or limits the rule, then the hypotheticals. Cases become parentheticals in your outline, not the organizing units.

Keep the full citation once, in Bluebook form, the first time a case appears — Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938) — and use a short form everywhere after (Erie). This costs nothing and means your outline is already half a memo if a professor asks for one. Aim for the outline to be finished before reading period, so that period is spent doing practice exams rather than typing.

Yes, and it changes most between rule-dense and theory-dense courses. In Civil Procedure and Evidence, your notes should track the text of the governing rule or statute — the actual language of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) or Federal Rule of Evidence 403 — with cases as gloss. Copy the operative rule text into your outline; the exam will turn on its words.

In Torts and Contracts, doctrine is largely common law and often comes in majority/minority pairs. Structure notes around the split: majority rule, minority rule, Restatement position, and which one your professor thinks is correct. In Constitutional Law, tiers of scrutiny and the doctrinal test for each clause are the organizing units, and the reasoning of the opinions matters more than in any other 1L course — expect to take longer notes on concurrences and dissents.

Legal Writing, seminars, and clinics do not reward this system at all. There, the notes that matter are the ones on your own drafts: what the instructor said to fix, and the rule of professional or citation practice behind it. Keep a separate running document of feedback you have received, and reread it before every submission.

The failure modes are consistent and easy to avoid once named.

Fix them by rereading one class's notes the same evening, for five minutes, and adding what is missing while you can still remember it.