But I would like it if they read some cases in full. Just so that they know how. Even if they don’t full understand the case.

Casebooks are fine: they are, as Jacques said, aggregators. They save time, effort and paper.

Often the students won’t be able to understand some of the procedural and factual detail in older cases. Often only a portion of a case is relevant and the legal questions dealt with in the other sections will still be beyond their comprehension.

Speaking from my own, now long distant, teaching experience, I would be quite happy if the students even actually read (carefully, of course) the portions of the case extracted in the case book. Of course, this depends on the care in which the casebook is prepared.

I think students can learn to read cases without necessarily reading every case which is cited to them.

I think that the future of textbooks will be something like the Amazon Kindle — an ebook reader. Consider that each semester’s textbooks for most topics is $500 and up, suddenly a $450 device seems like a good bet.

In law it would be pretty easy to ditch the textbooks as they mostly perform an aggregation role, rather than adding much value. This is because the core value is in the cases themselves.

I’m not sure whether that model fits in computer science, my own major; especially since journal articles tend to be copyrighted to a small group of publishers.

The only time I ever had a good uni team experience was when I was in a team of workaholics like myself - everyone pulled her weight, our main problem was that we did TOO much, so one useful team member’s role was to cut it all down to something managable!

I promise you, when I am the king of the academics, there SHALL BE NO TEAM EXERCISES. TEAM EXERCISES ARE AGAINST MY RELIGION. I think they’re invented by academics who didn’t practice for long and thus have no idea of how a real team works.

So I sympathise with your position - how frustrating. Good luck with it all.

They’re not evil, just a little conducive to laziness. So I’d still use them, I’d just then go to the original case after using them. In doing legal research, I usually read what someone else has said about a case first before I launch into it.

I don’t actually like the US Socratic method much, being a UK educated gal and therefore quite traditional.

Also, I don’t think you can get proper contribution from a class until (a) the class knows something about the topic (topic usually takes a few weeks to percolate through) (b) the class feels comfortable with the teacher and the other students and (c) the class is not too large. I’m the kind of person who’d thrive in a Socratic style class, but I know my sister (a much shyer person) might not have thrived. So I try to tailor my classes to all personality types - some lecturing, some questioning.