Writing case notes is a common form of assessment in law school, especially for first-year law students. It exposes them to basic legal research, writing, and thinking skills before moving on to substantive subjects. More importantly, the preparation of a case note is usually the first taste first-year law students have of reading case law and identifying the ratio. It is also a common piece of legal research writing both in legal practice and in academia. But, are there practical steps to teach case note writing?
But my experience of teaching and marking case note writing, and informal discussions with students, indicate that they have consistently struggled with the case note assessment – particularly with the identification and explanation of the ratio.
A few years ago, I decided to go back to fundamentals in planning how to teach case note writing. But rather than starting with the activity itself, I started with some basic principles of lesson design and planning.
Establishing the playing field
An LLB is the most common method of entry to the legal profession in Australia. There are learning outcomes associated with the degree as a whole, and individual units within the degree, that are determined nationally by the Council of Australian Law Deans (the Teaching and Learning Outcomes (TLOs) for LLB students) and the Law Admissions Consultative Committee. Each unit also has learning outcomes approved by the Dean of each faculty. Some universities also have a set of graduate attributes applicable to all units offered on campus.
Good curriculum and instructional design mean that each of these sets of requirements should be aligned within a unit or course and reflected in assessment as a way of demonstrating that an individual law student has been assessed against accepted expectations.
If we had to picture that hierarchy, it might look something like this:
Identifying the players
But just identifying the requirements isn’t enough. We also need to think about the law students that we will be working with. That is going to include things like the size of the group, their age, their educational experience so far, and their current level of confidence.
Each of these things is going to be critically important to the design of the lessons. For example, the majority of first-year law students in Australia tend to fall within a period in social and cognitive growth associated with ‘young adulthood’. Studies of learning at this stage suggest that students at this stage struggle with ambiguity and assume that there is one right answer according to what lecturers or tutors tell them.
In writing a case note, that’s important. There is rarely one correct version of the ratio and one correct way to set out a case note. Explaining that there may be different ways of expressing the ratio, and in fact that an important part of advocacy is to argue for a particular interpretation, is difficult and at this stage, ambiguity needs to be de-emphasised until the basic skills are established.
Planning the play
Despite case notes being endemic to legal study, there is no consistent or single method to teach or write one. Frustratingly for students, there is no pro forma or precedent for presenting it.
However, when you are introducing the skill for the first time, there is a need to provide more active support and direction initially. That means providing very structured explanations initially as a means of building – scaffolding – students to take an increasingly independent role. Rather than just explaining what a case note looks like, I write one in class. I explain what I am doing as I work through the decision. In a series of planned steps, I begin to hand over responsibility for the task to students. Ultimately, I move to getting students to work independently.
So what does it look like? My planning for the series of lessons looks like this:
Does it work?
Law students I have worked with, after stepping through this series of lessons, have generally expressed more confidence and performed well in case note writing. Just as importantly, they demonstrated much more confidence at the end of the process in tackling the process of reading cases.
What do you think? Is it worth a try in your law school classroom? Could I improve it?
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