How to Read Less and Understand More in Law School

This article helps law students stop drowning in endless readings by showing them how to read strategically, focus on what matters, and turn dense materials into useful exam-ready notes.

If you are studying law, you have probably already discovered one of the most exhausting parts of the degree: the readings.

Every week, the pile grows.

Textbook chapters.

Cases.

Journal articles.

Legislation.

Lecture slides.

Tutorial questions.

Supplementary materials.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, you are expected to understand the law, remember it, apply it, prepare for class, keep up with assessments, and perhaps occasionally experience sunlight.

No wonder so many law students feel overwhelmed.

The worst part is that even when students do complete the readings, many still do not feel like they understand what they have read.

They finish the chapter and wonder what just happened.

They read the case and have no idea how they could use it in an exam.

They stare at a journal article that appears to have been written in English, but not in any form of English known to ordinary human beings.

It is easy to think this means you are not smart enough.

It is easy to imagine that everyone else in your class is calmly reading everything, understanding everything, and quietly becoming a brilliant lawyer while you are still trying to work out what a constructive trust is.

Let me reassure you.

They are not.

All law students are in the same sinking ship.

Over the years, I have tutored many high distinction students who felt just as uncertain, anxious and overwhelmed as students who were struggling to pass. The difference was not that the high distinction students understood every reading. They usually did not. The difference was that they eventually learned how to be strategic.

They stopped trying to read everything.

They started trying to read what mattered.

That is the shift this article is about.

Why completing law school readings feels impossible

For each law subject you may be assigned a textbook chapter, one or two cases, and perhaps a journal article for recommended reading. If you are reading carefully, trying to understand the law, and taking notes as you go, that can easily become 12-18 hours of reading per subject each week.

Multiply that across four law subjects and you are staring at something close to 60 hours of reading before you have attended lectures, prepared for tutorials, worked on assignments, revised for exams, gone to work, or had anything resembling a life.

That is not a study plan.

That is an endurance event disguised as a reading list.

Occasionally, I meet a student who somehow manages to complete this impossible undertaking. Usually, they are fortunate enough not to have paid work and can devote almost every waking hour to study.

You might expect that student to feel calm, prepared and in control.

They usually do not.

More often, they are overwhelmed, exhausted and buried under so much content that very little has actually been retained. They have read everything, but understood very little. They have moved their eyes across hundreds of pages, but have not necessarily built usable knowledge.

And that is the real problem.

Law school does not reward you for completing readings. It rewards you for deeply understanding about 50% of the course content, and being able to apply this law to a novel set of facts.

Much of what you read will not help you answer exam or assignment questions.

This is the uncomfortable truth about law school.

A significant amount of assigned reading is not there because it is essential. It is there because the course has grown over time.

New cases are added. Old cases remain.

Background history is included.

Overruled cases are explained in painful detail.

Academic debates are prioritised over helping students actually understand the current law.

Textbook chapters become longer.

Lecture slides become heavier.

And very little course content is ever removed from a law course. Legal academics are forced to add new cases as they develop, but are under no obligation to remove the overturned law. So course content swells semester after semester.

Over time, many law subjects become dense thickets of material.

Some of it is important.

Some of it is interesting.

Some of it is historically useful.

Some of it is there because it has always been there.

The problem for students is that everything is presented with the same level of seriousness. The essential case, the overruled case, the historical background, the academic debate and the obscure footnote can all appear in the same reading list.

So students assume they must understand all of it.

That is where the trouble begins.

Why legal writing is so difficult to understand

There is another reason law readings feel so painful.

Legal writing is often unnecessarily complicated.

Cases can be dense.

Textbooks can be dry.

Legislation can be drafted in a way that makes ordinary language look like it has been dragged through a maze.

Law journal articles can be even worse.

Felix Cohen famously criticised legal writing in the 1930s as a form of ‘transcendental nonsense’ – abstract language that is intentionally dense and difficult to understand so that the public cannot understand and therefore critique the law.

Any law student who has tried to read a High Court judgment knows exactly what that feels like.

Legal writing often turns simple ideas into complicated language.

Concepts such as the in personam exception to indefeasibility, factual causation, invitation to treat, mens rea, constructive trust, equitable assignment and chose in possession can make law feel like a foreign language.

And in some ways, it is.

Law students are not just learning legal rules.

They are learning a new vocabulary, a new method of reasoning and a new way of organising ideas.

The problem is that many readings do not help students make that transition. They assume students already understand complex concepts. They assume students can extract the principle from the noise.

Many cannot.

And that is perfectly normal.

But here is the truth: most law is far simpler than it looks.

One of the things I learned after teaching law for more than a decade is that most legal principles are much simpler than they first appear.

The hard part is getting through the language.

Once you have taught the same topic many times, the structure becomes clearer. You start to see what matters and what does not. You can identify the principle, the test, the exception and the likely exam issue much faster.

That is why I can now explain some topics in fifteen minutes that I once spent two lectures discussing.

Not because the law suddenly became more simple, but because I eventually learned how to strip away the unnecessary material.

For example, a law school lecture might spend hours moving through the history of a doctrine, older cases, exceptions, reforms, academic debates and unresolved tensions. Some of that may be useful for advanced understanding.

But a student preparing for an exam usually needs something much simpler:

• What is a brief summary of the law that can be written in an assignment or exam in the structure expected by markers;

• Some examples of how this law was applied in different cases;

• An example of how to apply this law in a novel factual scenario similar to an exam question.

Unfortunately, law readings never actually help students with this task.

What follows are my tips for using your readings strategically to prepare for assignments and exams.

Tip 1: Do not start with the readings

This may sound strange, but one of the best ways to approach law readings is not to start with the readings.

Start with the tutorial questions. In other words, before you begin the week 2 readings, first look at the week 3 tutorial or seminar questions.

Those questions tell you what out of the pile of readings your lecturer thinks matters.

They show you the legal issues you are expected to identify and the law you are expected to understand.

They give your reading a purpose.

Instead of opening a textbook and trying to absorb everything, you are now looking for answers to a small number of questions.

That changes everything.

Now your reading is not aimless.

It becomes a search.

You are looking for legal principles, tests, elements, exceptions, cases and examples that help answer the question in front of you.

This allows you to skip material that is interesting but not useful.

It also makes your notes much better because your notes are connected to assessable topics.

You are not just summarising a chapter.

You are building tools for problem questions, essays and exams.

Tip 2: Read strategically, not heroically

One of the biggest problems in law school is that students are told what to read, but not how to read it.

They are given a reading list.

They are not given a strategy.

So most students read from top to bottom.

They start with the textbook.

They highlight far too much.

They try to summarise everything.

They get lost in cases.

They spend hours trying to understand paragraphs that may never matter for an exam, assignment or tutorial.

If you do not know what you are looking for, everything looks important.

Many law students treat readings as a test of moral character.

If they complete all the readings, they feel virtuous.

If they fall behind, they feel guilty.

This is the wrong way to think about it.

The goal is not to read heroically.

The goal is to read strategically.

A strategic reader asks:

What is assessable?

What is likely to appear in a problem question?

What law must be summarised?

What case establishes that principle?

What part of this reading helps me answer an exam or assignment question?

What can I safely skim?

What can I ignore?

That last question is important.

You cannot treat every page as equally valuable.

Some pages deserve careful attention.

Some deserve a quick skim.

Some can be skipped entirely.

That is the key to staying on top of your readings. If you learn how to skip unimportant sections of textbooks or cases you suddenly can cut your readings in half. And the best part – doing so actually improves your understanding.

You have moved from passive reading where you retain and understand next to nothing, to focused reading on important passages that helps you answer tutorial questions and build exam-ready notes.

Tip 3: Never read a whole case

Students often assume they need to read every case in full.

In most circumstances, they do not.

Cases are important, but reading full judgments is often a painfully inefficient way for beginners to learn law.

Judgments are not written as teaching materials. They are written to decide disputes. They often contain procedural history, factual detail, competing arguments, multiple judgments, qualifications, references to earlier authorities and reasoning that can be difficult to separate from the actual legal principle.

For many students, reading the whole case produces more confusion, not more clarity.

A better approach is to use AI to generate a case summary. Never ask AI to summarise a case. First download the PDF, then attach this, and ask your preferred AI to summarise the case using only the attachment. Here is a prompt I use daily:

"Summarise the attached case using only the attachment. Start with a brief overview of the facts. Summarise the law applied, including the sections of legislation and the common law test. Explain how this law was applied to the facts and the outcome of the case. Every time you draw on the case provide a pinpoint citation in AGLC including the paragraph number. Finish with a one sentence summary of the ratio of this case."

As long as you check the pinpoint references against the PDF you know you have generated a 100% accurate summary of the case in a matter of seconds.

Tip 4: Turn readings into exam-ready notes

Reading without making useful notes is one of the great traps of law school.

You can spend hours reading and still have nothing useful to take into an exam or use in an assignment.

Your notes should not be a diary of what you read.

They should be a working tool.

You should be spending most of your study time each week developing structured summaries of the law asked about in your tutorial questions.

For example, if you are reading about a legal test, do not simply write paragraphs about the history of the doctrine.

Write the test in a way you would in an exam.

Break it into steps.

Add the legal authority.

Add brief case summaries where the law was breached and it was not.

In other words – develop a template that you can use to answer not only your tutorial problem question, but any question on that topic.

The goal is to create notes that help you answer questions, not notes that prove you suffered through the reading.

Final thoughts

Law school readings are often long, dense and difficult to use.

That does not mean you are not smart enough.

It means you need a better system.

Start with the tutorial questions. Use them to guide your reading.

Stop reading cases and instead get AI to generate case summaries.

Turn your readings into exam-ready notes.

Focus on what helps you answer legal questions.

You do not need to read everything to do well in law school.

You need to know what matters, understand it clearly, and practise applying it.

That is the difference between drowning in readings and studying with direction.

If you want a more practical system for managing readings, making better notes, preparing for tutorials, and staying on top of law school without burning yourself out, my How to Study Law Efficiently ebook walks you through the process step by step.

It is designed to help you stop drowning in content and start studying with more direction.

Get the How to Study Law Efficiently Ebook