Community Guidelines

Last updated: August 23, 2026

The short version

Gavel works from your own notes and your own case reading. Bring what you wrote. Do not bring your casebook, your professor's slides, a commercial outline, another company's question bank, or another student's work. That is the whole rule, and everything below is detail.

What you may add

Notes you wrote. Typed class notes, cleaned-up transcriptions in your own words, your own summaries and reading notes. These are your work and your copyright, and they are what the product is built to use.
Your own writing. Practice answers, outlines you built, briefs you wrote, your own hypotheticals.
Judicial opinions, statutes, and regulations. The text of the law is not copyrightable in the United States. A court opinion you pulled from a public source is fine to paste into the case reader. An edited and annotated version of that opinion printed in a casebook is not, because the editing and the annotation are the publisher's work.
Material you have permission to use, where the permission actually covers putting it into a tool like this one.

What you may not add

Casebook pages and excerpts, including scanned pages, photographs of pages, and text copied from an electronic casebook. This includes the notes, questions, and problems a casebook prints around an opinion.
Commercial study aids. Hornbooks, treatises, published outlines, flashcard decks you bought, and supplements.
Another provider's question bank, in whole or in part, whether copied, retyped, or paraphrased closely enough to substitute for the original.
Bar examination materials. Licensed and released examination questions belong to the bodies that write them.
Restatements and model codes. These are copyrighted by the organisations that publish them, even though they read like law.
Your professor's materials without permission. Slides, handouts, problem sets, recordings, and posted answer keys belong to whoever created them, usually your professor or your school. Your notes about a lecture are yours. A copy of the lecture materials is not. See the Academic Honor Code.
Another student's work, including a shared outline from an upper-year student, a study group's bank, or a note set someone sent you, unless they created it and told you that you may use it this way.
Anything under an exam embargo, or anything you were told not to share. See the Honor Code.
Personal information about other people, where it is not necessary and they did not agree to it.

When you add material to Gavel you are telling us you have the right to do so. If you are not sure whether something is yours to use, the safe answer is to write your own notes about it and use those instead. That is better practice anyway.

A share link makes a note set readable by anyone holding the link, for as long as it is live. That is a real act of publication, and it is the one place where material you added stops being private to you.

Share only material you would be comfortable being read by someone outside your class, because that is what a link permits.
Do not use share links to distribute material to a wide audience, to post publicly, or to route around the rules above.
Every link can be revoked at any time, and links expire by default. If you chose no expiry when you created one, it stays live until you revoke it, so revoke the ones you no longer need.
You are responsible for what you share. A share link does not move responsibility for the underlying material to us or to the person who opens it.

Classes and educators

If you run a class on Gavel, publishing material to enrolled students is distribution, and the rules above apply to it with more force rather than less. Publish only material you created or have the right to distribute to your students. Follow your institution's policies on course materials and on student information. What you can see about your students is limited to whether they completed work you assigned; you cannot see their private notes, briefs, answers, or grades, and you should not ask them to send you those through the platform.

Using the service fairly

One account is for one person. Do not share credentials or resell access.
Do not scrape, bulk-export, or systematically copy content out of Gavel, and do not use automated tools to do so.
Do not try to defeat usage limits, billing, or access controls, and do not probe or disrupt the service.
Do not use Gavel to harass anyone, to post abusive or hateful material, or to impersonate someone.
Do not represent Gavel as affiliated with, endorsed by, or provided through any law school. It is not.

A word about the AI features

Questions, briefs, feedback, and outlines are generated with AI assistance from the material you supply, and they can be wrong. They are practice, not authority. Do not treat Gavel output as a statement of current law, do not submit it as your own work for credit, and verify anything that matters against your course materials and official sources. We do not use your notes or your writing to train AI models or to build the shared question bank; see the Privacy Policy.

Reporting a problem

If you see material on Gavel that breaks these rules, tell us at contact@gavelstudy.com. Describe what it is and where you saw it. If you are a copyright owner, the Copyright and DMCA Policy is the formal route and the one that starts a clock. If you are an instructor or an administrator, the Academic Honor Code has a route built for you.

What happens when a rule is broken

What we do depends on what happened. In rough order of severity, we may:

Remove the material and tell the account holder why.
Revoke share links or unpublish material from a class.
Warn the account, or suspend its ability to share or publish while keeping private study intact.
Suspend the account.
Terminate the account. Repeated copyright infringement leads here by the schedule set out in the DMCA policy.

We aim to match the response to the conduct, and to warn before we terminate where the situation allows it. Flagrant cases, and anything that puts other people's rights at risk, may skip straight to the end. These guidelines are part of our Terms of Service.

This document was last updated August 23, 2026.