Hitting the Books
My occasional series about the law school casebook continues. [First post here.] This is about the future of law, law practice, the legal profession, and legal (and higher) education, filtered through the lens of contemporary law’s most essential artifact, the teaching tool that unites every professor, every lawyer, every judge, and every student, regardless of field, in a shared experience. The casebook.
Law professors love to write things like “I use this as a lens for that,” because it makes them feel and sound like their academic colleagues in other parts of the university. “We’re researchers, too!,” we like to think, even if we rarely say so out loud.
That micro bit of casual academic sociology is the key to this installment, which is in other respects an effort briefly to explain where casebooks come from and why, despite generations of legal professionals complaining about them, neither their fundamental forms (including prices) nor their contents seem to change much.
By design, casebooks are set up rarely to give readers the contents of legal doctrines, but instead to provide students with an annotated set of primary source materials from which students are expected to discern the rules. As teaching texts, as a rule casebooks are guides for the soon-to-be-initiated rather than actual summaries of law. They are devices for migrating generations of students out of “student” mode, in which they are presumed to enter law school, and into “practicing professional” mode, in which they exit it.
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