A case for another case method

Vanderbilt Law Review

Volumn 60, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 597-607

  Rakoff, Todd D ^a   Minow, Martha ^b  

^a Department of Administrative Law ^*

^b HARVARD LAW SCHOOL   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 35348984145     PISSN: 00422533     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (21)

1. That method itself echoed medieval casuistry. See generally ALBERT R. JONSEN & STEPHEN TOULMIN, THE ABUSE OF CASUISTRY: A HISTORY OF MORAL REASONING 8-11, 16-332 (1988).
2. C.C. LANGDELL, A SELECTION OF CASES ON THE LAW OF CONTRACTS v-vii (1871).
3. Id. at v.
4. Id.
5. Id. at vi.
6. Id. at vi-vii.
7. Id. at vi.
8. Id.
9. Id.
10. Id.
11. See Kenneth Culp Davis, An Approach to Problems of Evidence in the Administrative Process, 55 HARV. L. REV. 364, 404-07 (1942).
12. LANGDELL, supra note 2, at vi.
13. The fact that many law school exams present unfolding problems, albeit in a truncated form, in effect confesses the gap between the appellate opinion and the lawyers' tasks that we seek to address. [I]t has become apparent on several levels that professors do not test what they teach, as often during the first year curriculum they "teach by the case method and actually test by the problem method." Typically, first-year law students are greeted in the first weeks of school with massive reading assignments of appellate court opinions (the standard Case Method) followed by class periods which engage in some form of Socratic dialogue regarding those cases. At the end of the semester, although taught by the Case Method system, typically they are presented with the standard three-hour exam with loaded fact patterns providing complicated legal problems for which they have received little or no explicit training. Cathaleen A. Roach, A River Runs Through It: Tapping into the Informational Stream to Move Students from Isolation to Autonomy, 36 ARIZ. L. REV. 667, 673 (1994)
14. (quoting Myron Moskovitz, Beyond the Case Method: It's Time to Teach with Problems, 42 J. LEGAL EDUC 241, 260 (1992)).
15. LANGDELL, supra note 2, at v.
16. David A. Garvin, Making the Case, 106 HARVARD MAG., Sept.-Oct. 2003, at 56.
17. Id.
18. Although we admire many teaching efforts that use a "problem method," we distinguish the detailed fact-drenched case studies we are proposing from the short paragraph-length problems that are often used in published casebooks. Closer to our proposal are efforts to give students the actual documents and place them in developed roles with assignments to produce analyses, recommendations, and decisions. See, e.g., DAVID R. HERWITZ, BUSINESS PLANNING: MATERIALS ON THE PLANNING OF CORPORATE TRANSACTIONS app. A at A1-A37 (2d ed. 1984);
19. see also Frank E. A. Sander, Learning by Doing, 25 HARVARD L. SCH. BULL., Apr. 1974, at 16 (tax workshop). Stanford Law School has developed a series of environmental law case studies in this direction.
20. See STANFORD LAW SCHOOL, CASE STUDIES ABSTRACTS, available at http://www.law. stanford.edu/ publications/casestudies/case_abstracts. Georgetown Law Center recently developed three international and comparative law problems and assigned each first year law student to work on one of them for a week.
21. See GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER, WEEK ONE: LAW IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT, available at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/documents/ weekone2006.pdf.