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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 in practice guides, treatises, or hornbooks (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.
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.
Today, the leading publishers of casebooks are Aspen Publishing (which took over the old Little, Brown and Company legal publishing division), Foundation Press (part of Westlaw), and LexisNexis.
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