Casebook method

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The casebook method, also known as the case method, is the primary method of teaching law in law schools in the United States. It was pioneered at Harvard Law School by Christopher Columbus Langdell. It is based on the principle that rather than studying highly abstract summaries of legal rules (the technique still used in most countries), the best way to learn American law is to read the actual judicial opinions which become the law under the rule of stare decisis (due to its Anglo-American common law origin).

Towards this end, American law professors traditionally collect the best 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.

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 countries, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand.