Every review year runs on secondary material: reviewers, outlines, commentaries, digests, lecture notes. None of it is authority. All of it is useful — for finding, for orientation, for deciding what to read next — and the difference between those two facts is what separates an answer that reads like law from one that reads like a summary of a summary.
What authority means
In an answer, authority is what the decision-maker is bound by or persuaded by:
- Primary authority: the Constitution, statutes, rules, administrative issuances, and the decisions of courts.
- Secondary material: everything that describes, summarises, or comments on the above.
A citation to secondary material does not do the work. "According to [a reviewer], the requisites are…" invites the examiner to ask what the provision says. The provision says it; cite the provision.
What secondary sources are genuinely good for
Do not dismiss them; use them for what they do well.
| Use | Why it works |
|---|---|
| Finding the primary authority | A reviewer that cites a case saves you a search — provided you then read the case |
| Orientation in an unfamiliar block | A 20-page outline tells you the shape of a subject in an hour |
| Spotting the distinctions | Good secondary material has already noticed the pairs examiners test |
| Deciding whether a case is worth reading | A digest tells you the holding; the decision tells you why |
| Noticing what you have not studied | A table of contents is a checklist |
The rule is simple: secondary material tells you where to look; it never tells you what to write.
The three failures that follow from getting this wrong
The unverified rule. A rule memorised from a reviewer, stated confidently, and wrong — because the reviewer was old, or simplified, or was describing an exception as the rule. This is the most common source of a confidently wrong answer.
The invented citation. Worse: a case name attached to a proposition it does not hold, because the reviewer's paraphrase was looser than the case. See citing Philippine cases.
The paraphrase that drops the qualifier. The reviewer said "generally"; the candidate writes "always". The examiner knows the exception, and the mark is lost at the word "always".
How to use a reviewer properly
A workflow that keeps the discipline:
- Read the section for orientation — what the topic is, and what its sub-topics are.
- Find the citations in the section, and read at least the leading one at the source.
- Write your own note from the primary text, not from the reviewer's paragraph.
- Mark the reviewer's citation as unverified until you have checked it — and keep the mark.
That fourth step matters at scale. Your outline should distinguish, visibly, between what you have verified and what you have merely read. In September that distinction is the difference between relying on a note and hoping.
Digests, ours included
A digest is a compression, and ours are the same shape as everyone's: facts, issues, ruling, doctrine. They are designed to let you decide whether to read a case, and to fix its shape before you do.
What a digest cannot do is tell you what the decision says about a question the digest did not address — and bar questions are frequently about the edges. So: digest to choose, decision to answer. For how the digests are made, see how our case digests are made.
The one-page test
Take any proposition in your outline. Ask: can I name the provision or the decision that establishes this, and have I read it?
- If yes, the note is authority-backed. It will survive an examiner's question.
- If no, the note is a belief. It may be right, and you cannot tell.
A review year is largely the work of converting the second kind of note into the first — which is why verification is not a chore appended to study but a form of it. See statutory research for the texts and the Supreme Court E-Library for the decisions.
Why this is worth writing about at all
Because the examination is marked by lawyers who know the difference. An answer with a provision and a properly cited case reads as the work of someone who has been to the source. An answer with confident generalisations reads as someone who has read about the source.
Both candidates may know the same law. Only one of them can show it.