What should you actually write down?
Six things, and nothing else: the facts that changed the outcome, the procedural posture, the legal question, the rule the court announces, the reason the court gives for that rule, and the disposition. Everything else in a casebook excerpt is context. If you cannot say why a sentence is in your notes, delete it.
For facts, apply the substitution test: would the result change if you swapped this fact out? In Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., 248 N.Y. 339 (1928), it matters that the package was wrapped in newspaper and gave no notice of its contents, that the guards were railroad employees, and that Mrs. Palsgraf stood far down the platform. It does not matter that she was carrying her daughters to Rockaway Beach. Two sentences of facts is usually enough; five is a symptom that you have not decided what the case is about.
For the rule, copy the court's own sentence verbatim if the court states one cleanly, and put it in quotation marks with the page number. Courts choose their words carefully, and your paraphrase on Tuesday will drift by the time you outline in November. Then write the rule again in your own words underneath. If your version and the court's version say different things, you have found the part you do not understand yet.
How do you read so notes take one pass instead of three?
Read the last paragraph first. Appellate opinions almost always end with a disposition — affirmed, reversed, remanded, vacated — and knowing the winner before you start converts reading from a mystery into a hunt for the reasoning. This is not cheating. Judges write for readers who already know the outcome.
Then read straight through without a pen. No highlighting, no marking. A first read with a highlighter in your hand produces a yellow page and no memory, because you are making marking decisions before you have the information to make them. On the second pass, which will be much faster, you annotate.
Budget the time honestly. In the fall of 1L, a principal case will take you twenty-five to forty minutes including notes. By spring it should be twelve to twenty. If you are still at forty minutes in March, you are almost certainly writing too much, not reading too slowly.
What should your margin system look like?
Use a small, fixed set of marks so the page is readable at a glance three months later. Consistency matters more than which symbols you pick. Bracket, do not highlight, long passages — brackets show boundaries and highlighting only shows enthusiasm.
Keep highlighting to one or two colors at most. Students who assign five colors spend their reading time on color selection. The margin is where the thinking goes; the page is just the source.
- F — a fact the court leans on later
- R — the rule statement (bracket the sentence, write R in the margin)
- P — procedural posture or standard of review
- H — holding, meaning the rule as applied to these facts
- D — dicta, so you do not later quote it as law
- ? — you do not understand this; a cluster of question marks in one paragraph tells you what to ask in office hours
- ≠ — this conflicts with the previous case; the seed of every synthesis question on an exam
How do you capture procedural posture without getting lost?
Posture controls what the court is allowed to assume, and professors cold-call on it because most students skip it. Write one line: who sued whom, on what claim, what the trial court did, who appealed, and what standard the appellate court applies.
The standard drives the rest. On a Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal, the court takes the complaint's well-pleaded factual allegations as true, so a statement like 'defendant acted negligently' in the opinion may be an assumption rather than a finding. On summary judgment under Rule 56, facts and reasonable inferences go to the nonmovant, and the only question is whether a genuine dispute of material fact exists. On review of a jury verdict, the court asks whether any reasonable jury could have found as it did — a much more forgiving question. Appellate courts review questions of law de novo, findings of fact for clear error, and many discretionary rulings for abuse of discretion.
Write the posture line before the facts line in your notes. It reframes everything below it.
Should you book brief or write a separate brief?
Book brief for cold-call survival; write separately for anything you will need in November. Annotating in the casebook is faster and keeps the text next to your reaction, which is why most 2Ls do it. Its weakness is that it is not searchable, not sortable, and not synthesizable — you cannot line up four personal jurisdiction cases side by side inside a bound book.
The practical compromise: annotate the casebook fully, then type four to six lines into a running course document. One entry per case, same fields every time, so the document becomes a table you can read down a column. Start each entry with the case name and the casebook page, and add the real citation from Westlaw or Lexis if you might quote it later. Casebook editors cut internal citations, footnotes, and whole sections of opinions, so never treat the excerpt as the authoritative text.
On citation form in your own notes, follow Bluepages B10 for the full cite — case name, volume, reporter, first page, pincite, and a parenthetical with court and year, as in MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., 217 N.Y. 382, 389 (1916). After a full cite, use Id. at 391 when the immediately preceding authority is the same source, and a short form like MacPherson, 217 N.Y. at 391 otherwise. Note that supra is not used for cases under Rule 10.9. You do not need perfect form in class notes, but building the habit now means you are not learning it under deadline during a legal writing assignment.
How do you note concurrences, dissents, and the casebook's notes?
Give a dissent one line: what rule it would adopt, and the strongest reason. Dissents are on exams because they hand you the counterargument in polished form. A plurality or concurrence that narrows the majority gets the same treatment — in Asahi Metal Industry Co. v. Superior Court, 480 U.S. 102 (1987), the whole point of the case for a Civil Procedure student is that the Justices split on what stream-of-commerce means, so a note recording only 'no jurisdiction' is worthless.
The notes and problems after the case are not filler. Casebook editors put the doctrinal synthesis there, and professors build hypotheticals from them. Read them and write down any question the editors ask that the case does not answer, because that gap is usually the class discussion.
Keep one running synthesis line per case: how does this change the rule from the last case? World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson, 444 U.S. 286 (1980), adds that the relevant foreseeability is not that the product will travel to the forum but that the defendant could anticipate being haled into court there. That one sentence is worth more on an exam than a page of facts about an Audi.
How do these notes become an outline and an exam answer?
Your notes are raw material, not a product. Every two or three weeks, take the cases from one doctrinal unit and collapse them into a single rule statement with the cases hanging off it as illustrations. Consideration, promissory estoppel, and the mailbox rule each get one entry with three or four case names attached, not four separate case entries.
The test of a good reading note is whether you can use it to argue. On an exam you will not write 'Hadley v. Baxendale held that the miller could not recover lost profits.' You will write that consequential damages are recoverable only if they arose naturally from the breach or were within the contemplation of both parties at contracting, and then apply that to the facts in front of you. If your notes are organized around case names rather than rules, you have built an index to a book you will not have time to open.
One more discipline: after each class, spend three minutes correcting your notes to match what the professor said the case stood for. Professors write the exam. Where your reading and the professor's emphasis diverge, the professor wins.