How to Remember Statute Sections for Law Exams

Even if you are excited about a legal career that requires you to argue before courts, negotiate deals or resolve disputes, studying the law may be a bit disappointing at times. Before you can do all those exciting “lawyerly” things, you actually need to learn the basics, which involves a lot of tedious work, such as memorising statute sections for your exams. While you can’t avoid memorising statute sections, there are steps you can follow to tackle this seemingly boring task strategically and perform better in your law school exams.

Select only the most relevant sections

Statutes are divided into chapters, sections and subsections for a reason. Each statute is a coherent body of law containing many provisions, not all of which will be relevant to your study topics. For that reason, you are not required to study the entire statute in order to prepare for your exam. Instead, you will only select a few of the most relevant statute sections and subsections to memorise, so that you are actually able to remember them during the exam. Here’s how you should go about doing this:

• Don’t get blindsided by the fact that your course syllabus lists many sections of a particular statute (or even entire chapters of the statute) as relevant. Lecturers tend to include in the content of their lectures plenty of cases and statute sections, because they want you to get a broad knowledge of the subject throughout the term. But not all of those statute sections will come up in your exam, so you should be strategic about which statute sections you will include in your revision notes.
  
  
• Select only around three to five of the most important statute sections per topic to avoid overstuffing your mind with other statute sections that may not be relevant or important to the topic that you are preparing for. This will help you make sure that you can actually recall the sections at the time of the exam, and that you know how they are relevant to the question you are answering.
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TIP: To learn how to select the most relevant statute sections for your exam revision check out my 1st Class Law Exam Revision Course.

Avoid memorising too many subsections

Statutes are often quite complicated, with some sections containing many, many subsections. The main section is usually supplemented by subsections that either clarify the meaning of the main section (e.g. include a definition of a particular term) or provide a list of situations to which the main section applies or doesn’t apply. Because subsections are explanatory provisions, they tend to be lengthy and complex. If you don’t want to get confused, you should avoid memorising too many subsections for the purpose of your exam and only focus on the main sections.

For example, section 4 of the Human Rights Act 1998 contains six lengthy subsections. If you tried to memorise them all, you would be wasting not only your time but also the precious space in your brain that stores information before exams. In this specific case, instead of trying to memorise all the subsections you should just memorise the fact that section 4 introduced something called a “declaration of incompatibility” along with an explanation of what that means.

This strategy will not work for all the law topics you will be studying, but it will work for the majority of them. So you will have to use your judgement to try to understand which of the topics require you to memorise subsections. Alternatively, if you will be struggling with identifying the right sections and subsections to revise before your exam, you can check out my 1st Class Law Revision Notes on different topics, which list only the most important statute sections, cases and definitions along with explanations.

Use memorising techniques

abouMemorising law sections before exams can be tedious, but you can be clever about it and have fun at the same time by trying out different memorisation techniques. Here are some proven memorisation strategies that you could try out:

• Flashcards: These are easy to execute and can even be done digitally using apps. You can also test your knowledge anytime and anywhere with flashcards.
  
  
• Mnemonics: With mnemonics, you can inject a little bit of fun into your law studies by using words that you can easily remember or words that are relevant to you. You can even use words that are common in pop culture if this can help you retain the law statute sections more. A popular mnemonic is “PEMDAS” which stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition and Subtraction.
  
  
• Mind maps: If you are a visual learner, making mind maps is a good strategy for how to remember law sections. Mind maps let you see the connection between the main section and the subsections, or between different main sections of the statute and your topic. You can even get creative by adding colors to your mind maps, if you think that colorful notes will best help you retain what you have studied.
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TIP: For more about exam revision memorising techniques check out the 1st Class Law Exam Revision Course.​

Write down all sections at the start of your exam

One of the most tricky parts of law exams is time management. When you are under pressure to write two or three answers to exam questions within a short period of time, you can easily get stressed and forget all the statute sections which you worked so hard to memorise. In fact, poor time management which leads to unnecessary stress and forgetfulness is one of the most common reasons why students fail their exams or just don’t do as well as they should. 

One technique that you can use to improve your time management and stop yourself from forgetting the material you learned is to write down all the statute sections in bullet points at the start of your exam for each question that you will be answering. At the beginning of the exam the information in your head is still fresh, as it has not yet been muddled by the legal problems and questions you are tackling. This means that at that stage you can easily recall the list of statute sections which you memorised. Later on, once you start trying to formulate your thoughts into sentences, this might become significantly more difficult.

Once you begin writing your answers to exam questions, you can refer back to the bullet-point list of statute sections which you created. This will help you to quickly write down each sentence without wasting time looking for the relevant law section in your head. But make sure not to spend too much time creating the bullet point list. It should really only take you around 20-30 seconds, since your memory is still very fresh. If you end up spending 5 minutes trying to recall the statute sections at the beginning of the exam, then perhaps this technique is not right for you.​

Final word

No one said that studying law is easy, but you can definitely improve your chances of getting a first in your exams if you keep in mind the above tips on how to remember law sections. So, memorise your law sections consistently and soon you will find that you have already built that muscle memory needed for your law exams.

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