Alessandria for law students
A law lecture is mostly case names, years and the principle each one is being cited for — said once, at speaking speed. Alessandria writes the lecture up in full shortly after you upload it, keeping the names as they were said and the glossary of terms, so that when you come to a problem question you are working from what the lecturer actually stated rather than from what you managed to get down.
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A law lecture is mostly citations, delivered at speaking speed
An hour of contract or tort is a chain of authorities: party names, the year, the court, and the proposition each case is being cited for. None of it is repeated, because the lecturer assumes the reading list is doing the repeating.
Written by hand, that chain arrives in your notes with holes in it. Not the obvious kind — you rarely lose a whole case — but the kind where the name is there and the year isn’t, or the name is there and what it was cited for isn’t.
A case name with nothing attached to it is not a note. It is a reminder that something happened in that lecture.
Ratio or obiter — the distinction your notes usually lose
This is the one that costs marks, and it is peculiar to a common law degree. Within a single judgment the lecturer moves between the ratio decidendi — the part that binds — and obiter dicta, remarks the judge made along the way. Dissenting judgments get quoted just as often, and they are not law at all.
Spoken aloud, these are separated by a subordinate clause. Written down at speed, they usually aren’t separated by anything. And here is why it matters more than an ordinary slip: you cannot catch it by rereading. The case name is right, the year is right, the sentence reads perfectly — and the authority is being used for something it never decided.
Getting a case wrong is visible. Getting its status wrong looks exactly like getting it right.
And the assessment is written, which raises the price
Problem questions and essays are marked on whether you applied the right authority to the right facts, and on whether you cited it properly — OSCOLA is its own convention and it carries marks of its own. A misremembered year is not a rounding error there; it is a citation that doesn’t check out.
Seminars work the same way from the other side: you are expected to arrive having read the cases, and to be able to say what each one decided rather than what it was about.
What Alessandria changes
The lecture is written up in full
You upload the recording and shortly afterwards you have the whole hour written out — not a summary. The case names stay as they were said, with the years that were said.
The glossary holds the terms of art
Consideration, estoppel, remoteness, volenti non fit injuria: defined from the way the lecturer used them in that lecture, not from a general dictionary.
Nothing is filled in for you
If a year wasn’t said, it stays missing rather than being guessed. On the timeline, a step without a certain date stays without one — which in a subject built on chronology is the only safe behaviour.
What that buys you is simple: when you sit down with a problem question, the thing you are working from is what was said in the room, not the fraction of it your hand kept up with.
Across a whole module
Come revision, eight tools read every lecture of a module together — practice exam, multiple-choice quiz, super-summary, semester map, timeline. Every lecture is genuinely read; none is sampled or skipped.
- The timeline puts a line of authority in order, which is how a doctrine is actually examined.
- The practice exam asks about what was taught on your module, not about law in general.
- Dates are never invented. If the lectures didn’t establish one, it stays open.
What Alessandria doesn’t do
It does not read the cases for you and it has no view on the law. It works on your lectures: what was said in them, and nothing else. It won’t tell you whether an authority is still good — that is what the reading list and the seminar are for.
And nothing inside the app is shared: no function to send documents to coursemates, no shared folder, no download. The only way out is publishing your notes to your own Notion.
No slides, no PDFs, no images, no video: a lecture here is an audio recording or a text file. A judgment in PDF doesn’t go in.
Two minutes of contract, and what’s left of it
…so the classic authority here is Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company, 1893, Court of Appeal. The company advertised that it would pay a hundred pounds to anyone who used the smoke ball and still caught influenza, and said it had deposited a thousand pounds at the bank to show it meant it. Mrs Carlill used it, caught influenza, and sued. The company argued there was no contract — mere puff, and no communication of acceptance. The court held it was a unilateral offer to the world, and that performing the condition was the acceptance, so no separate communication was needed. That deposited thousand pounds is what took it out of mere puff. Bowen LJ says some interesting things in passing about how far an offer to the world could go — that’s obiter, don’t hang an answer on it…
Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co (1893, Court of Appeal)
Facts: advertisement promising ÂŁ100 to anyone using the smoke ball who still caught influenza; ÂŁ1,000 deposited at the bank.
Company’s argument: mere puff, and no communication of acceptance.
Ratio: a unilateral offer to the world is capable of acceptance by performance; performing the condition is itself the acceptance, so separate communication isn’t required.
The deposited £1,000 is what showed intention — it is why this wasn’t mere puff.
Obiter (Bowen LJ): remarks on how far an offer to the world might extend — flagged in the lecture as not to be relied on.
Glossary for this lecture
Unilateral offer — an offer accepted by doing the thing, rather than by promising to do it.
Mere puff — advertising language not intended to create legal relations, as the company argued here and lost.
Ratio and obiter stay marked as the lecturer marked them. That is the distinction you cannot recover later.
A worked demonstration built from a first-year textbook case. We wrote it ourselves: no lecture recording and no words from a real lecturer appear on this page.
Questions from law students
Does it get case names and years right?
Names and years are kept as they were said in the lecture, and terms of art go into the glossary defined the way the lecturer used them. Nothing is added that wasn’t said: if a year wasn’t given, it stays missing rather than being guessed.
Will it tell me whether something was ratio or obiter?
It keeps the distinction the lecturer drew, because that distinction was spoken aloud in the lecture. It does not make that judgement itself — deciding what a judgment’s ratio really is, is your work and the seminar’s.
Can it replace reading the cases?
No, and it isn’t meant to. It works on your lectures only. The reading list exists because a lecture is a guide to the authorities, not a substitute for them.
Does it help with OSCOLA citation?
Only indirectly: it gives you the names and years as they were said, which is the raw material a citation needs. The citation convention itself is yours to apply.
Is it useful across a whole module?
Yes: eight tools read every lecture of a module together, including a practice exam, a multiple-choice quiz and a timeline. Every lecture is genuinely read — none is left out.
What can I upload?
An audio recording (mp3, m4a, wav, ogg, opus, flac, aac, iPhone voice memos included) or a text file. Slides, PDFs, images and video do not go in.
Try it on this week’s lecture
Upload the recording and read the whole hour written out, with the case names still in it.
The first two lectures are free. No card details.