Stare Decisis: On the Role of ‘Case Law’ in the Case Method of Teaching

Abstract

Why should law schoolsbe obsessed with case law when there is nothing that corresponds to this phenomenon in the curriculum of business schools? What, more specifically, are the skills that are developed through the consideration of precedents in case law that are missing in the attempt to teach decision making through cases in business schools? This perspective essay is an attempt to differentiate between the approaches to the case method in use in law schools and business schools in the United States. Insofar as the use of the case method within professional schools in the American Ivy League has become a role model for pedagogy elsewhere, it is important to understand that there is a whole typology of approaches to the case method. While it is not possible to exhaust the different approaches in this essay, we must at least differentiate between the law school and business school approaches to teaching with the case method. This is all the more important since the introduction of the case method at Harvard Business School in 1908 was influenced by the pioneering experiments conducted at the Harvard Law School in the 1870s by Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell. The main theoretical and practical difference between theseapproaches was the importance accorded to stare decisis (or the role of precedents in case law) as a constraint in the process of decision making in the law school. Furthermore, cases used in the law schoolsystem are written by judges belonging to the appellate judiciary and not by faculty themselves. This gives a different orientation to the case method altogether since a case written by a faculty won't haveany legal authority, but cases written by judges will. It is therefore important to expose students in business schools (who have to study business law, company law, and theories of regulation) to the role of precedents in judicial approaches to decision making. This essay attempts to make a pedagogical case to do precisely that.