Review years produce a quiet competition in pages. Candidates report how much they read, how fast, and how many times; almost nobody reports what they can produce afterwards — which is the only number that matters.
Speed is not the enemy. Unmeasured speed is.
The trade, stated plainly
For a fixed amount of time, reading faster covers more material and encodes less of it. The relationship is not linear and it is not the same for all material:
- A statute or rule — slow. A word changes the answer, and the qualifiers are the content.
- A decision's ruling — moderate. Read the ratio carefully and skim the survey.
- A textbook chapter — fast, because you are looking for structure, not detail.
- Your own outline — fast, and rarely useful; retrieve instead.
- A reviewer's summary — fast, and never a substitute for the text.
The skill is not reading quickly or slowly; it is choosing the speed per text.
The threshold that matters
A useful test: after a reading session, can you state the three main propositions closed-book?
- If yes, the speed was fine, whatever it was.
- If no, you read faster than you could encode, and the pages are gone.
That test takes two minutes and it is the only honest measure of whether a session worked. Apply it for a week and you will discover your actual ceiling — usually slower than you believe, and faster than you fear.
Why skimming fails on legal text
Three features of legal prose punish skimming specifically:
- Qualifiers. "Unless", "provided that", "subject to" — the exception is often the examinable part, and it lives in a subordinate clause.
- Numbering that carries meaning. Article 1196 is not interchangeable with Article 1197, and a fast reader conflates them.
- Definitions that displace ordinary meaning. A term defined in section 2 does not mean what it means in conversation.
So the material where speed is safest is the material you will not be tested on, and the material you will be tested on is the material that punishes speed.
How to read faster where it pays
Speed belongs in three places:
- The survey of a decision — the procedural history, the recitation of earlier cases.
- Textbook prose — orient, then go to the provisions.
- Re-reading for structure — a second pass on an outline, which is orientation, not study.
And it does not belong in: the ruling, the elements, the exceptions, the definitions, or anything with a number in it.
The technique that beats speed
For material you must retain, two passes beat one fast pass:
- Pass one: read quickly for the shape — what is this about, what are the parts?
- Pass two: read slowly only the parts that answer the question, and write the note closed-book.
That is faster in total than one slow linear read, and it retains more, because the second pass is targeted. It is the same principle as how to read a Supreme Court decision, applied to everything.
What to do with the pages you cannot hold
You will read more than you retain. That is normal and it is why the review year has retrieval in it. The material you read and lost is not wasted if the second meeting is a retrieval test rather than another read — see spaced repetition.
The habit to avoid: reading again what you have already read, at speed, to feel productive. It is the most common form of unmeasured reading in a review year, and it produces the least.
The one number
If you track one thing about reading, track this: how many propositions can I state, closed-book, from this week's reading?
Three is a good week. Zero is a week that happened on paper.