According to a recent article in the New York Law Journal, some law schools are mulling the question, “If the law is becoming more of a business, should law schools become more like business schools?”1 The article went on to report on specific developments at a few top law schools, including the following:
The cornerstone of business school teaching is the case-study method. The major features of the business school case-study method are (1) the discussion of one case study per class meeting; (2) class participation makes up a large percentage of the course grade, generally as much as 50% (this is unlike most large law school classes, where class participation counts little or not at all); and (3) the final examination consists of another case study.3 In MBA classes a case study is usually between five and twenty pages long. It lays out a fact pattern and requires students to plan a responsive course of action.4 Advantages of the case-study method over law school’s case method include its requirement of group effort, its encouragement of meaningful class participation, and its focus on problem solving. According to Professor Don Welch of Vanderbilt Law School, “Legal education helps prepare students to exercise professional judgment through the case method. But it may be that the kind of case method used in business schools . . . does this more effectively.”5
Law professor Douglas Leslie of the University of Virginia likes the case-study method so much that he has developed a series of casebook alternatives utilizing a similar approach, which he sells over the Internet; he calls these “CaseFiles.”6 Currently CaseFiles are available for courses in contracts, property, employment law, labor law, and sports law.7 Each CaseFile provides a fact pattern and a selection of authorities.8 A CaseFile’s authorities generally include several cases and sometimes include statutes and/or secondary sources such as Restatement sections.9 In classes that apply the CaseFile teaching method, class discussion addresses one CaseFile per class and students are expected to extract legal rules from the selected authorities and apply them to the fact pattern.10 In Professor Leslie’s own classes, the final exam consists of another CaseFile.11
Not all legal educators are enthusiastic about business school teaching methods, however. Jonathan Macey, a law professor at Yale who teaches business law classes, has opined that, “The larger part of business school curriculums is about learning skills. Learning the law is much more subtle.”12 Columbia law professor Thomas Merrill, who used to teach at Northwestern, told the New York Law Journal that his former employer’s efforts were “a little mechanical and a little overboard in trying to superimpose the business school model.”13
Furthermore, law school’s “case method” of teaching, in which students read and analyze selected appellate cases in order to extract from them generally applicable rules of law, has been around since 1870,14 and will not be abandoned lightly. Law professors tend to like the case method “because that was the system under which they themselves learned the law. The fact that the law professors themselves, who generally have outstanding law school records, thrived on the case method only heightens their natural affinity for employing the method.”15 Widespread law school adoption of business school teaching methods is therefore likely to meet with considerable inertia.
1 Anthony Lin, Law Schools Steal a Page from Business Schools, N.Y.L.J., Apr. 28, 2004, at 1.
2 Id.
3 Douglas L. Leslie, How Not to Teach Contracts, and Any Other Course: PowerPoint, Laptops, and the CaseFile Method, 44 St. Louis U. L.J. 1289, 1307 (2000).
4 Id.
5 D. Don Welch, “What’s Going on?” in the Law School Curriculum, 41 Hous. L. Rev. 1607, 1617 (2005).
6 Leslie, supra note 3, at 1307-14.
7 CaseFile Method: An Approach to Teaching Law, http://www.casefilemethod.com (last visited Aug. 11, 2005).
8 Leslie, supra note 3, at 1306.
9 Id. at 1306, 1310.
10 Id. at 1306.
11 Id. at 1309.
12 Lin, supra note 1.
13 Id.
14 David D. Garner, Comment, The Continuing Vitality of the Case Method in the Twenty-First Century, 2000 B.Y.U. Educ. & L.J. 307, 316-17.
15 Id. at 339.