Textbooks and casebooks

The idea of a textbook is very straightforward. Most textbooks cover conventional subjects (such as criminal law or land law), but some are wider in their scope. The most extreme version of width of scope is Halsbury’s Laws of England, which is an encyclopaedic work running to more than 50 volumes, including a comprehensive updating service.

The distinction between textbooks and casebooks is that textbooks contain the authors’ statements, explanations and criticisms of the law, while casebooks contain extracts from the judgments of the courts and, where relevant, statutes and other materials, together with linking commentary and criticism. While casebooks are, on the whole, very useful aids, because the editor has done the work of sifting through the cases in order to decide which ones to include, as well as sifting through each individual case to decide which are the key passages in the judgments, they have two major limitations.

First, if a case is fundamental to your understanding of a particular area of law, you should not simply rely on what someone else thinks are the key points in the case, but you should read the whole case before deciding for yourself what it is really about. For example, the editor of a casebook may simply note that there was a dissenting judgment, without reproducing any of it. In practice, however, it is not uncommon for dissenting judgments to be adopted as ratio either by an appellate court in the same case, or by another later court which is free to depart from the earlier decision within the limits set by the doctrine of binding precedent.

Secondly, if you progress to practising the law professionally, you will often have to read entire cases for yourself in order to identify precisely those propositions for which they are – and are not – authority. This kind of analysis requires legal skills of a high order, which can be gained only by extensive experience and repeated practice. It is never too early to start acquiring and developing these skills.