Date: December 23rd, 2009 12:44 PM Author: excitant public bath
They fill the space between the cases with stuff that just needlessly confuses you, at which point you will feel the need to buy an UNDERSTANDING or E&E type book (likely made by the same publisher) to clarify things again. But imagine if they just removed all the "notes and questions" and instead inserted the material from the fucking UNDERSTANDING book.
In my more gunnerish moments, I have taken the time to actually go through those N&Q questions in some chapters and even look up the case results that they leave hanging - as often as not I find myself saying "Wow, that's actually irrelevant" or "this case isn't really on point at all."
Date: December 23rd, 2009 12:48 PM Author: excitant public bath
If it weren't for the fact that the cases are usually heavily edited, it'd make good sense to just print all the cases from WL and put them in a couple binders. But you'd waste a lot of time reading stuff you don't need to read.
TBF SOME casebooks actually seem to put useful shit in between cases instead of just useless N&Qs. The red Aspen books seem to be the worst offender in this regard.
total racket. if they didn't obfuscate we'd see how shallow law school teaching is. and then they charge huge prices for public domain materials simply because they can force us to buy the materials. few of them give a fuck about students. (my estimate: about 20% do.)
and when they come calling over the years, asking for money from me, i will remind them that i was overcharged for learning contracts from a professor who does know shit about real contracts and for learning property from a professor who doesn't know shit about land ownership.
Date: December 23rd, 2009 1:26 PM Author: coiffed cerise theatre
the worst is in a class like admin or fed courts where a case is pretty complicated, and then the notes and questions pose a lot of important questions without answering them
even if they felt the need to play traditional hide the ball shit for 1L classes, classes like admin law are so dense that they should teach us like they'd teach busy professionals any dense material. give us the outline. discuss the key issues. identify the thorny issues.
Date: December 23rd, 2009 6:08 PM Author: orange new version point
the other thing i hate is when the main case in a section is some stupid case from 1850, and then the more important recent cases are stuck in notes after the case
Date: December 24th, 2009 12:25 AM Author: Wine library
Yeah, my LS friends stopped going to Admin because the professor just confused them. He had a PhD. in Political Science and went out of his way to wonk.
Date: December 23rd, 2009 6:13 PM Author: irradiated crotch rehab
I kind of like the way it's set up; you have to work a bit to get some of the law. Dukeminier's notes and qs allowed me to utterly destroy our curve, breaking the next highest score by 16 points and probably costing 3-4 classmates an A.
Date: December 23rd, 2009 9:44 PM Author: Cheese-eating 180 Stage
Well, the point of legal education isn't to teach you the blackletter law. Anyone can read a summary of the law. It is to teach you legal thinking, legal reasoning, legal deduction.
So you're right that the notes would be crappy if they were intended to teach you the blackletter law. But that's not their intent.