Casebook Method - History and Technique

History and Technique

To set up the case method of law study, American law professors traditionally collect the most illustrative cases concerning a particular area of the law in special textbooks called casebooks. Some professors heavily edit cases down to the most important paragraphs, while deleting nearly all citations and paraphrasing everything else; a few present all cases in full, and most others are in between. One common technique is to provide almost all of the entire text of a landmark case which created an important legal rule, followed by brief notes summarizing the holdings of other cases which further refined the rule.

Traditionally, the casebook method is coupled with the Socratic method in American law schools. For a given class, a professor will assign several cases from the casebook to read, and may also require students to be familiar with any notes following those cases. In class, the professor will ask students questions about the assigned cases to determine whether they identified and understood the correct rule from the case, if there is one — in certain heavily contested areas of the law, there will not be any one correct rule.

A typical example in the law of contracts is Hadley v Baxendale (1854), a case that is still routinely tested on bar examinations today. Treatises designed for practicing lawyers as well as textbooks for students earning non-legal degrees (i.e., business law courses for business administration students) concisely state the famous rules announced in that case that (1) consequential damages are limited to those foreseen by the parties at the time of contracting, thus implying that (2) a party must notify the other up front of its specific needs in order to expand what is mutually foreseeable and thereby recover consequential damages if the other breaches. Thus stated, Hadley seems simple enough, but a casebook for a law school course will not say that. Rather, the law student must deduce those principles from the text of the Court of Exchequer's slightly archaic mid-19th-century decision.

This teaching method differs in two ways from the teaching methods used in most other academic programs: (1) it requires students to work almost exclusively with primary source material which is often written in obscure or obsolete language; and (2) a typical American law school class is supposed to be a dialogue about the meaning of a case, not a straightforward lecture.

In some law schools, the casebook method is used in conjunction with lectures or other more structured forms of instruction. This is especially true in classes which are more heavily geared toward statutory law, such as tax law (which in the USA is governed by the Internal Revenue Code) and certain areas of commercial law (particularly courses dealing with the Uniform Commercial Code).

This method is also used in other common law countries, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The case book method overlaps with the case study method, but the two are not identical.