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. See also Portal:Law The stela of King Hammurabi depicts the god Shamash revealing a code of laws to the king. ... // A law school is an institution where future lawyers obtain legal degrees. ... The crest of Harvard Law School is drawn from the Royall coat of arms Harvard Law School (HLS) is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. ... Christopher Columbus Langdell (May 22, 1826 _ July 6, 1906), American jurist, was born in New Boston, Hillsborough county, New Hampshire, of English and Scotch-Irish ancestry. ... The law of the United States was originally largely derived from the common law of the system of English law, which was in force at the time of the Revolutionary War. ... Look up Opinion in Wiktionary, the free dictionary An opinion is a persons ideas and thoughts towards something. ... Stare decisis (Latin: , Anglicisation: , to stand by things decided) (more fully, stare decisis et non quieta movere) is a Latin legal term, used in common law to express the notion that prior court decisions must be recognized as precedents, according to case law. ...

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. A professor giving a lecture The meaning of the word professor (Latin: one who claims publicly to be an expert) varies. ... A casebook is a type of textbook used primarily by students in law schools. ...

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 then cross-examine students 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, which is quite disturbing to new law students. Socratic method (or method of elenchos or Socratic debate) is a dialectic method of inquiry, largely applied to the examination of key moral concepts and first described by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues. ...

This teaching method differs in two ways from the teaching methods used in most other academic programs: (1) it requires students to work almost all the time 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.