Flashcards for law students

Law students already write the thing a flashcard system needs. A case note with Facts, Issue, Holding and Reasoning under separate headings is, structurally, four cards. DecksMD’s whole proposition is that you should not have to retype it into a second app to find that out.

Case notes become cards for free

Tag the note #decks. Every heading at your configured level becomes a card front; the text beneath becomes the back.

---
tags: [decks]
---

# Donoghue v Stevenson [1932]

## What were the material facts?

A decomposed snail in an opaque bottle of ginger beer, bought for the
claimant by a friend — so there was no contract between them.

## What did it establish?

The modern law of negligence: a manufacturer owes a duty of care to the
ultimate consumer, absent any contractual relationship.

Headings above your chosen level become breadcrumb context rather than cards, so the case name travels with every card from that note. You are never looking at a holding wondering which case it belongs to.

Elements and tests: cloze

Most of what law examines is a list that must be recited completely. That is what cloze deletions are for.

Negligence requires ==a duty of care==, ==breach of that duty==, ==causation== and ==remoteness of damage==.

Each highlight becomes its own card. You can hide the remaining elements — drilling each one cold — or show them, which drills your ability to complete the structure. Those are different skills and it is worth practising both.

Cloze also works inside table cells, which is useful when you are comparing tests across jurisdictions.

Comparisons: tables

Where cases are best learned side by side — the competing tests, who decided what, which authority displaced which — a two-column table turns each row into a card. A third column carries notes shown with the answer, which is a natural home for the citation.

For anything with more moving parts than front-and-back, templates let you bind a wider table to a card design, so case → court → year → ratio renders as a consistent card rather than a run-on sentence.

Revising a topic taught across a term

Contract law is not delivered as one tidy block, and it is not revised as one either.

Filter decks build a live deck from a query — every card tagged #contract, wherever it lives. Add a case note in week ten and it joins the deck automatically. Cards keep their own scheduling; the deck is a view, not a copy.

Because tags work per card as well as per file, one note about a case that touches both contract and tort can feed both decks without being duplicated.

Practice papers that do not cost you anything

The obvious worry with drilling before an exam is wrecking a term’s worth of carefully spaced intervals.

Exam decks are built for that. They run a graded, one-sitting session in any order, with an optional time limit and pass score, and a results breakdown afterwards. Multiple choice comes from ordinary markdown task lists; heading and table cards are asked as type-in; cloze appears as blanks. Grading can be exact, typo-tolerant or self-graded — and self-graded is the honest setting for anything where you are writing prose.

Exams explicitly do not affect FSRS scheduling. Neither does cram. You can sit a mock paper the night before and your spacing is exactly where you left it.

Keeping the volume sane

Per-tag profiles give each module its own daily new and review limits and its own retention target — so the subject you are examined on in three weeks can be held to a higher standard than the one examined in June. The future-due forecast in statistics shows pile-ups before they land.

More guides

• Flashcards for medical school
• Flashcards for engineering students
• Flashcards for language learning
• Flashcards for exam preparation

Or start with what FSRS actually is, or how DecksMD compares with Anki and the Spaced Repetition plugin.