Why Should I Teach From (And Contribute To) a Casebook?

If you’ve ever taught law, you will have had to decide whether to build your course around an established casebook authored by somebody else, or from materials (cases, legislation, and articles) you’ve compiled yourself.

As a law book publisher, I’d like to make the case for teaching from a casebook; and, if you have the opportunity – contributing to one.

For one thing, when choosing to teach from a book, you’re not just making a straight choice between your own and someone else’s materials. Even if an authored casebook is the work of a single author, by the time it’s in its third or fourth edition, several different academics will have taught with it for multiple years. Many of these educators will have provided influential feedback to the author, and like a rough river stone tumbled smooth by the current, any problems with the book will have been corrected. Structural flaws will be addressed, gaps will be filled, and tangents will be trimmed – or else the book will not be successful enough to warrant revision, and it will die out.

In the much more common instance of a multi-authored casebook, the content is often the result of rigorous debate: contributors will have had to defend to each other their choices with respect to both content and approach. They will also have had to fight for a share of page count, an exercise that helps correct imbalances in emphasis and encourages an efficient approach to the material.

Then there’s where you yourself come in: in adopting the book for your course, you will no doubt identify areas of dissent. Articulating these will force you to examine your own biases and idiosyncrasies. While an educator can always choose not to assign a chapter or to supplement another, in making these choices you will be engaging critically with the material in a way you might not if you were simply selecting your preferred cases and compiling them. It’s akin to having a colleague stand over your shoulder asking, “why that resource? And why not this? On what basis do you disagree?”

The result is that in engaging with a resource developed by your peers, you will be challenged to refine and develop your own personal theory of the doctrine and to situate that theory within the broader context of how your course is taught at other Canadian schools. In other words, in striving for a deeper understanding of how we think about a subject area, it helps to first understand how others think about it, and how they teach it. To develop our own approach against the backdrop of a clear understanding of others’ approaches is to participate in a meaningful way in academic discourse.

This engagement can only increase your confidence in the value of your own unique perspective on a subject. If you have the time and the opportunity, you may even be inspired to join the book’s author team for the next edition, or to spearhead a rival text that reflects an alternative approach. If you are in private practice, authoring a casebook can be more than just a way to boost the prestige of your bio on the firm’s website. Law students who use the book will be introduced to your name and reputation before they even enter the profession. Not only can this encourage them to apply to work for the firm, but it can raise the firm’s profile generally, communicating not only that the firm employs practice-area leaders, but also that it encourages its lawyers to give back to the profession. I hope you’ll give it some thought!

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Nora Rock (she/her)
Publisher, Law School
Emond Publishing