Casebook method

The casebook method, similar to but not exactly the same 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 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).

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 never say that. Rather, the law student must deduce those principles from the somewhat archaic text of the Court of Exchequer's mid-19th-century decision.

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