What Have You Gotten Into?
Please read this after you read pp. 1-11 in the Berch casebook.

Some law professors criticize American law schools’ reliance on casebooks and the case method of instruction.  One of the most persistent is Alan Watson, a highly-regarded Roman and civil law scholar at the University of Georgia.  Here are a couple of perhaps-surprising statements from his article, Introduction to Law for Second-Year Students?, 46 J. Legal Education 430 (1996):

"My point is that the standard approach misrepresents the way law is, how it develops, and its relation to society.  Concepts and principles are badly downplayed.  So are rules, and their authority and stability.  Cases are removed from their legally relevant context, and the authority of the context is dismantled.  Oddly perhaps, a further result of this approach is that often cases are removed from their social context.  The judges' yearning for authority and the future judges' respect for it are downgraded.  So is the nature of the authority that is requisite or desired."  (pp. 437-38)

"A true search for authority is always backward-looking.  Law as expounded by judges has a built-in tendency towards conservatism."  (p. 438)

"At most times in most places, legal rules, structures, and institutions are borrowed -- sometimes, but not always, out of respect for the time-tested accumulation of wisdom behind them."  (pp. 439-40)

"[O]ne of the striking features of law is precisely its longevity."  (p. 442)

"Legal thinking, in the Western world at least, is authoritarian and essentially conservative."  (p. 435)
 

Questions for discussion:  What does Watson mean by "authority"?  Where does it come from?

                                                         * * * *

On the other hand?

"It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers." 
                                                                    -- James Thurber

"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers." 
                                                                    -- Voltaire