Read the Actual Cases!
For many law students, actually reading the cases listed on their reading list in their entirety resembles a Herculean task.
First, there seems to be no time. Second, there is no point: they can find good (?) summaries online, sometimes even on Wikipedia! Why bother?
There are many answers to this rhetorical question. Firstly, most summaries you will find online are neither good not accurate. Secondly, we (law professors/lecturers) can instantly understand whether you’ve actually read the case or whether you are simply regurgitating the summary we have just read in many other students’ essays. Thirdly, and most importantly, it’s very bad practice not to read cases and only rely on summaries, either found online or in textbooks.
Why? There are several reasons, but I will only focus on two:
A) Court cases form the “bricks” of the legal discipline, both in common and in civil law systems. They are the primary material on which, together with statutes, the legal edifice is built. Having only a superficial knowledge of them will make it harder for you to understand the “why” and “how” of the law, while also exposing your flanks to counterarguments you never expected.
B) If you were a historian, would you expect to get away with not reading the actual primary sources, e.g. the account of a battle in the memoirs of a general, and only read the general description of that same battle by a historian writing 200 years later? Isn’t this similar to only reading the textbook account of a case instead of the actual case itself? Do you see the main problem here? The problem is that you are not learning about the actual case, you’re just reading someone’s else views about said case, which might very well be different to the one you would have formed. Perhaps, in your view, the key facts/paragraphs/dicta and takeaways would have been different. How can you know if you don’t read the case yourself?
So, let me come full circle and thus conclude this post the way I advise you to conclude your essays in my essay guide (insert your email at the bottom of my home page to get it for free):
Read the Actual Cases!
