Legal education today : teaching to actively engage law students : new approaches to the use of decided cases

![CDATA[The widely accepted method of teaching to law students requires those students to read appellate judicial decisions from a designated casebook or a reported case digest and attempt to identify the legal principle arising from the decision (case method). The teacher then questions students about the case as reported to elicit the facts, the reasoning and the ratio. In this context the dialogue between teacher and student is designed as a question and answer session. This method would normally be designed to elicit answers to questions that the teacher has prepared with known expected responses. This is sometimes referred to as Socratic although it has been pointed out that in a “pure Socratic dialogue, the questioner seeks, with the other participants, to find an answer that is unknown to all of them.” Generally speaking then the method used in a law school does not fall within the purest context of what is meant to be Socratic. This method of legal education has an emphasis on teaching legal rules from the cases. The cases are usually located in a case book that has been packaged and tailored for students.]]