I am attending a class of Kazuhiro Shiozawa, a professor of Seikei University law department from 2018. Even in the field of law, grasping the overall picture is important. There are over 1,000 provisions in the Civil Code in Japan. Grasping everything in detail is difficult. On the other hand, when discussing something, you need to refer the related articles. So you need to know where those articles are.
Therefore, in his lesson, we first create a sheet called ”Civil Code Map” by ourselves. The information written on this map is the same as the table of contents of the book. The difference is the form of information. The information is drawn like a tree so that you can find the upper and lower layers immediately. Also, it is one large paper so that you can see the whole information without turning the page.
I look at the map when referring to a specific article during class. Then we speak in order from the upper level as to where the article is. For example, Article 570 “Seller’s defect liability” is in Part 3 “Claim”, Chapter 2 “Contract”, Section 3 “Trading”. So every time we refer to the article, we speak “Part 3 Claim, Chapter 2 Contract, Section 3 Trading, Article 570, Seller’s defect liability.”
By those activities, we see the upper-level information again and again. The information near the root appears frequent. So we remember them naturally. To store huge amount of information systematically in the brain, it is a useful way that you trace the map from the root every time.
*1: Because I learned the legal terms in Japanese, I do not know how to express them in English.