Most candidates begin with an intention to read judgments regularly, and most abandon it within a month. The failure is rarely discipline. It is design.
The usual plan is to read landmark judgments in full, in chronological order, for an hour a day. That plan collapses because full judgments are long, chronology is the wrong sequence for learning, and an hour is exactly the block that disappears first in a difficult week.
Read for a purpose, not for coverage
Reading a judgment "because it is important" gives you no way to know what to extract or when you are finished.
Reading it to answer a specific question does both. Something like: what test did the court lay down, and what facts did it treat as decisive? That question tells you which parts to read closely and lets you stop when you have the answer.
Coverage is a byproduct of purposeful reading. It is a poor primary goal.
Most of a judgment is not for you
Reported judgments contain a great deal that serves functions other than teaching you the law: procedural history, extensive quotation of arguments, and passages addressing points that were ultimately not decided.
For preparation, the load-bearing parts are usually the issues as framed, the findings of fact, the ratio, and the operative portion.
This is not permission to read only headnotes. Headnotes are summaries written by someone else, and they routinely flatten exactly the nuance an exam question is built on. The skill is navigating a full judgment quickly and knowing what to slow down for.
Make the unit small enough to survive a bad week
An hour a day fails because it requires a good day. Something closer to fifteen or twenty minutes survives.
A workable unit is one judgment, read for one question, with three or four lines written afterwards. On a normal day you will exceed it. On a bad day you will still do it, and the habit does not break. Habits do not die from low volume, they die from missed days.
Write something, however brief
Reading without output produces a persistent illusion of understanding. You finish the judgment, it made sense while you were in it, and two weeks later almost nothing survives.
A few lines is enough:
- The question the court was answering
- The test or principle it settled on
- The facts that decided it
- One line on why it matters to something else you have read
That last line is the valuable one. It builds connections, and connections are what make recall possible under time pressure.
Group by problem, not by chronology
Reading a line of cases chronologically shows you how doctrine developed. That is genuinely interesting and it is not the most efficient way to prepare.
Grouping by problem is better. Take a question that recurs, and read the cases that bear on it together, regardless of when they were decided. You see the competing positions side by side, which is the form in which exam problems and moot propositions actually arrive.
Accept that you will forget most of it
You will not retain every judgment you read, and no serious preparation strategy depends on that.
What you are building is a sense of how courts reason: what kinds of arguments succeed, what facts turn out to matter, and where the genuine tensions sit. That sense survives long after the citations fade, and it is what lets you handle a problem you have never seen.
Recall of specific cases comes from a much smaller set that you revisit deliberately, not from the wide reading. Both matter. They are different activities and should not be confused.
A note on currency
Where a statute has been reorganised or replaced, older judgments may still be good law on principle while citing provisions that no longer carry those numbers. Read the principle, but verify the current provision against the bare act before you rely on the numbering in an answer.