Casebook

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Casebooks for a course on Criminal Procedure. The West Group book (from its American Casebook Series imprint) is on the left, and the Aspen Publishing book is on the right.

A casebook is a type of textbook used primarily by students in law schools. Rather than simply laying out the legal doctrine in a particular area of study, a casebook contains excerpts from legal cases in which the law of that area was applied. It is then up to the student to analyze the language of the case in order to determine what rule was applied and how the court applied it. The teaching style based on casebooks is known as the casebook method.

Most casebooks are authored by law professors, usually with two, three, or four authors, at least one of whom will be a professor at the top of his or her field in the area under discussion. New editions of casebooks often retain the names of famous professors on their covers decades after those professors are dead and the updating of the books has fallen on the shoulders of a younger generation of their colleagues. Such casebooks are often known by the name of that leading professor, such as Prosser on Torts.

The leading publishers of casebooks in the United States are West Group (publisher of the Foundation Press and American Casebook Series imprints), Aspen Publishing, and LexisNexis. Each of these publishers uses a quickly identifiable color and pattern for their book covers across all subjects.

The prevalence of the casebook method in American law schools has given rise to a market for commercial study aids "keyed" to a particular casebook edition. These study aids are generally summaries ("briefs") of the cases from the casebook to which it is "keyed," presenting them in the same order as the casebook. Often written by the same author who wrote the associated casebook, and published by the same company, "keyed" study aids are useful in distilling cases down to black-letter law. Popular study aid product lines include Legalines, High Court Case Summaries, and Gilbert Law Summaries published by West Group, and Casenotes Legal Briefs by Aspen.

[edit] Non-legal meanings

Casebooks are also what dramaturgs call the comprehensive research notebook they compile on a play in order to aid actors and directors in their interpretation of a script.

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