by Joshua Kahn

A lot of the legal bibliography exam boils down to memorization and, frankly, memorization is boring.  For many people, memorization means reading a list over and over again, or, for the more industrious among us, flash cards.  Neither really works all that well.

Personally, if I had to do it over again, I would try using a memory palace.

A memory palace is an old, simple, effective tool for using your spatial memory to remember non-special information (like how often different legal authority sources are updated).

Essentially, you bring a physical location you know well into your memory—like the house you grew up in, or your route to school—and populate it with vivid images representing the information you want to remember.  Then, when you need the information, you just “walk” back through your memory palace and look at the images.

You don’t need to buy any books to learn the technique, here are a few places you can look at online for free:

http://litemind.com/memory-palace/ (a helpful modern explanation)

http://www.utexas.edu/research/memoria/Ad_Herennium_Passages.html (Ad Herennium is the an ancient text that sets out the technique, don’t worry, it’s translated and very short)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

http://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Memory-Palace