Academic Honor Code

Gavel is a study tool for law students. Law school is governed by an honor code, and a study tool that ignored that would be worse than useless to the people it is for. This page sets out how we expect Gavel to be used, and how anyone at an institution can raise a concern.

1. Your school's rules come first

Nothing on this page loosens an obligation you already have. Your institution's honor code, student handbook, course policies, and your professor's specific instructions govern your conduct, and they govern it whether or not Gavel is involved. Where anything here is more permissive than your school's rules, your school's rules win. If a professor says not to use outside tools for a course, that includes this one.

2. What Gavel is for

Gavel turns material you already have into practice: questions from your notes, exam-style prompts, feedback on writing you did yourself, spaced repetition, and a workspace for reading cases. It is a way to rehearse, get things wrong somewhere that does not count, and find out what you do not know yet before an exam tells you.

It is not a substitute for doing the reading, attending class, or writing your own answers, and it is not an authority on the law. Everything it generates can be wrong, is labelled as generated, and should be checked against your course materials and official sources.

3. Never during a graded assessment

Do not use Gavel, in any form, during an examination, a quiz, a graded assignment, or any other assessment, unless your professor has explicitly told you in writing that you may. This holds for closed-book and open-book assessments alike, and it holds for take-home exams. Most law school honor codes treat an outside tool used during an assessment as unauthorised assistance, and the fact that the tool is a study product does not change that.

4. Submit your own work

Do not submit Gavel output as your own work for credit. Feedback on a practice answer is there to make your next answer better, not to be copied into a graded one. A brief the workspace drafted is a study aid for understanding a case, not a document to hand in. Where you are permitted to use AI assistance, disclose it the way your school requires.

5. Exam embargoes and material you were told to keep

Do not add to Gavel anything that is under an exam embargo, anything from an assessment that has not been released, or anything you were told not to share or distribute. This includes past examination questions your school has not released, memoranda and answer keys, problem sets you were asked to keep within the course, and anything a professor circulated with a restriction attached. If you are unsure whether something is released, treat it as not released.

6. Your professor's materials

There is a distinction here that matters, and it is worth being precise about it:

• Notes you took are yours. What you wrote down in your own words, your own understanding of a lecture, your own summaries and reading notes, are your work. Using them in Gavel raises no issue with anyone.
• Your professor's materials are not yours. Slides, handouts, problem sets, recordings, transcripts, and posted answer keys belong to their author, usually your professor or your school. Do not upload them, paste them, or reproduce them substantially, whatever format they are in.

Gavel is designed around the first of these, not the second. The product asks for your notes at the point you add material, and the Community Guidelines prohibit the second.

7. For faculty, deans, and administrators

If you are at a law school and you believe material of yours or your institution's is on Gavel, or that Gavel is being used in a way that conflicts with your policies, write to contact@gavelstudy.com and say so. Some commitments, so you know what you are writing into:

• You do not need to file a copyright notice. If you tell us material is yours or your institution's and was added without permission, we will act on that. The DMCA route remains available and carries statutory effect, but we are not going to make you use it to get your own course materials taken down.
• We will tell you what we did. You will get a response describing what we found and what action was taken.
• We do not claim any affiliation with any law school. Gavel is an independent product. Schools appear in the app only as entries in a list students pick from to describe themselves, and that is not an endorsement or a relationship.
• We do not solicit through institutional channels. We do not use law school email lists, official messaging systems, bulletin boards, class announcements, or staff and faculty channels to promote Gavel or recruit users, and we do not ask students to solicit uploads of academic materials on our behalf. If you believe someone has done so, tell us and we will address it.
• We do not train AI models on student material, and we do not merge it into a shared bank. A student's notes are processed to produce what that student asked for and are visible only to them unless they deliberately share them. See the Privacy Policy.

If it would help your faculty to understand exactly how material is handled before a concern arises, ask and we will walk through it.

8. What we do about violations

Where a student uses Gavel in a way that breaks this code, we may remove material, revoke share links, restrict sharing, suspend the account, or terminate it, following the process in the Community Guidelines.

We are not the arbiter of your school's honor code and we do not try to be. We do not report students to their institutions as a matter of course, and we do not monitor private study. Where an institution brings a specific, credible concern to us, we will look into it, act on our own rules, and respond to the institution about what we did.

This code is part of our Terms of Service. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here is a substitute for your own institution's rules.

This document was last updated August 23, 2026.