Thread by @JohnFPfaff

Every now and then I just get this giant burst of frustrated amazement that SO much of law school, esp the 1L year, is still built almost exclusively around cases.

It's really bad, for a lot of reasons.

If nothing else, SO much of law these days is statutes and regulations.

And even the way more and more schools react to this is... not great. "Leg Reg"? It's a great idea (we have it), but... the framing.

It's its own special thing. Off to the side. One class.

We don't have a class on "Common Law." We call that Torts. And Property. And Contracts.

So it makes statutes and regulations seem like a speciality issue, not--as they actually are--the heart of the modern regulatory state's law.

Cases, also, by definition, are outliers. Their facts will be outliers, their procedural process will often be an outlier, everything is an outlier.

To make it into a crim law casebook, you basically need a jury trial. These are... not things that really exist.

95% of real crim law isn't fighting over the border between practically certain vs. ignoring a big risk in a case with bonkers facts.

It's trying to navigate routine cases through the system. Casebooks never show us that.

Even more, teaching cases runs the real risk of overlooking how the formal law is just where law starts, not what it actually is (tho this is a real risk in the statute situation as well).

Like: we can teach caselaw about defamation, but what is the REAL law in SLAPP-less state?

(Anti-SLAPP law allow courts to make plaintiffs pay lawyer fees if it their defamation claims are frivolous, which makes it harder for a big corp to force a poor blogger to take down a post they lack $ to defend. No SLAPP, and suddenly the 1A turns on wealth.)

Anyway, the casebook system was (allegedly) designed by Harvard dean Christopher Columbus Langdell ... who died in 1906.

The law has changed ... a bit ... since 1906. We really need to upend how we teach it to reflect what it really is.