Conference on New Ideas for
Experienced Teachers:
We Teach But Do They Learn?

June 9–13, 2001
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

W. David Slawson, University of Southern California AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE CASE METHOD The case method is not an effective method of teaching a legal subject with which the students are not yet familiar. This is especially true for first year law students, who are not yet even familiar with the law itself. I would begin my presentation by giving my reasons for reaching these conclusions and for developing the alternative to the case method that I have. The handout material would consist of excerpts from my teaching materials (it would be inaccurate to call them a casebook), illustrating my alternative method for just one subject within the larger subject of contracts. However, instead of including cases in full, I would include just brief statements of them. Abstract of Thesis With the case method, the teacher's role is not to teach the law, but to teach how to extract the law from cases. The principal justification is that the cases are the law, so that every lawyer must know how to extract the law from them. Although this justification dates from when most of the law was common law, it logically survives into our era. Neither the increased importance of statutory law nor the greater tendency of courts to take public policies into account changes the essential fact that in almost any dispute about what the law is, courts' decisions are dispositive. However, despite this strong point in its favor, my experience has led me to believe that the case method is ineffective. Indeed, I think it prevents students from learning the law until they have “caught on” to the fact that reading cases is not the way to do it. A lawyer who wanted to learn an area of the law with which he was not familiar would not begin by reading cases. Rather, he would begin by reading one or more of the hornbooks, treatises or practice manuals on the subject. He would only read cases after he had read enough in these other sources to know which cases, or at least what kinds of cases, he ought to read and to be able to understand them when he read them. Thus, the case method has the learning process backwards. It has the students reading cases before they have a basis for understanding them or even know what to look for in them. My materials introduce each subject within the larger subject -- consideration within the law of contracts, for example -- with a textual explanation essentially just as a hornbook or practice manual would explain it, or even more simply, if possible. Next comes a case or two chosen because they are easy, straightforward applications of the law which has just been explained and also, if possible, because there is some human interest to them. Cases with some human interest are both more interesting to read and easier to remember. Then there are some cases, or abstracts or excerpts from cases, chosen to show problematic, tricky or otherwise interesting applications of the law or problems in it, and some notes of my own explaining or asking questions and, where appropriate, showing parallels to, or conflicts with, subjects the materials have already covered. I prepared the teaching materials in the spring and summer of 2000 and used them for the first time this fall. I will be able to report on the strengths and weaknesses I encountered in using them and the students' reactions to them by the time of the Conference in June.