Hi! I was wondering if anyone could tell me any strategies for remembering cases for essay, or any mnemonics for the legal syllabus? Having a struggle
Hey! Something I used mnemonics for was remembering partial defences and full defences. I find the best mnemonics are about your friends, or class mates, and are usually funny. You're more likely to remember something about your friend and the guy she likes than you are going to remember a sentence like "the old man walks slowly." I think this was the only mnemonic I used for Legal.
Cases, so I probably had about three or so big cases that fed into lots of parts of the syllabus, and then smaller cases that were specifically relevant for one or two things. So I used the R V Bilal Skaf case as a huge case for lots of things. I made a poster for my desk about the case and it helped me to visually recall the aspects of jury misconduct, law reform, victim impact statements, public outcry, retrial, etc. So for me, visually arranging things was super important in order to help me remember! Otherwise, just plain rote learning and testing. Simply saying out loud, "Dietrich V the Queen - *enter relevance of the case here*" over and over would help commit things to memory.
Remember, only so much of the legal course is about understanding the concepts and knowing how the legal system works, the bulk of it is colouring it in with cases, arguments, themes and challenges, and so on. Yeah, for multiple choice we need to know some little intricacies, but for your essay, you need arguments
I suggest brainstorming essay plans. So write up the top of the page, "young offenders" and then write down everything you know about young offenders, facts, stats, arguments, cases, content, etc! This way you're forcing yourself to think quickly by raking your memory. It worked really well for me for my HSC preparation