reading case law quickly & effectively (law school)

[Music] hey guys and welcome back to another video this video has been so heavily requested so i thought it was about the right time to make it and as you can see from the title it is about reading case store especially when you're at law school and how to read it quickly and effectively and it's really just a main skill that you need for law school but i know that when you first start it's one that you don't have and it does take probably the first term to develop and it can be so beneficial because you get so much case law that you have to read when you're at law school and you physically just can't read the full case because a lot of these cases are like 30 40 50 100 pages long and you get two or three of them for reading plus like other assigned reading of like you know journal articles and textbooks it's just not feasible to have to read it all in detail so basically the technique i'm going to share is how you read case law quickly basically it's a method of skimming but what to look for when you're skimming before i jump into how i would read a case i want to quickly tell you about the best ways to find the cases so typically if you're at law school especially in the uk your university or law school will have a subscription to a service whether it's westlaw lexisnexis you know something like that i think the most common one is westlaw and that's basically a legal database containing all of the cases legislation case comments you know interesting practice notes just basically articles written by lawyers and then also generally articles and things like that on there so that's that's how you should find your cases you shouldn't use like the government website or just google them because a lot of the cases on there if they've gone for appeal they won't be listed so they might not necessarily be like the most up-to-date case law and also they might not necessarily give you the full citation which you will need if you're going to reference this case whereas if you go on westlaw not only does it give you the full citation but it also normally gives you a summary and then it gives you the full pdf of the case that you can download and kind of read it leisure which is what i normally do so i've got my laptop here and i'm going to put the case here on screen as i go through and i'm basically going to talk you through how i would read a case what to look for what to include what i would actually read what i would the rest of what i would skim so effectively you only really need to read a full case if it's something you're going to do in more detail if for the seminar or for the lecture you just need to know what happened in the case and what the principle was i wouldn't even recommend reading the case most of the time on like westlaw and things you can have a you know summary of the case and that's what i would primarily use cheekily sometimes if they didn't have it i'd go on like swab or law teacher or like wikipedia they are not advised that is not advice that is just that's what i did they do not like it at law school when you do that but it makes life so much easier using those type of sites because it literally just has it like written in in english like in rather than legalese you know so you'd only really need to read the full case if you're doing like a lot of work on that particular case or that particular issue or you're writing an essay so really when you're actually reading a case the way i would do it is i would do it by subheadings so the first subheading you want to look for is the introduction which basically outlays the facts so really from the facts you just need the key ones so it doesn't really matter about he did this on monday that on tuesday that on wednesday it's really just like what was the crime what did he actually do you don't really need much of the detail and then also in the introduction often is the point of appeal which is basically the reasons why the case came to court and they're kind of important because then you can see why it came to court and what the outcome was and you can see kind of what the legal principle is and whether you agree with it by that method so after you've read the introduction then i'll just skim through it and find the other key subheadings so in this particular case the subheadings are the evidence which is then then just doing like sections from the witness testimonials in court and just going in more detail about what actually happened so if you're just looking at the principle of the case none of that's really that relevant and then the third subheading is the appeal which is basically them actually finally discussing this case at court rather than all the previous stuff that normally they'll just encompass the case law that's relevant you know previous quotes from cases things that other judges have said and that's kind of 50 50 dependent on whether that's relevant a lot of the time you can kind of skim that because if they're just quoting other cases that you also have to read for a certain assignment or whatever you don't really need to read what they're saying about them because you'll kind of know final heading in this particular case is then the review of sentence which is like the outcome of the case often it'll be the conclusion or the decision that's what they'll the subheading will be called and really that's kind of the principle of that case and the outcome of it and that's kind of the key the key bits really all you really need to read in a case is the facts evidence principle that's it the rest is kind of like the obita dictum which is like the interesting bits but it didn't actually count towards the law and as i said they're only really relevant if you're going to write an essay on a particular case or do a case comment or something like that so i hope you found this little video helpful and really i just wanted to kind of give my advice and thoughts on how i read case law it kind of takes some time to develop but once you've got it down you've got it down it's a skill for life and it can kind of also be applied to textbook reading as well and journal article reading although i'm tempted to make a whole other video about how i read research understand make notes on like journal articles so let me know in the comments if you want that video too but yeah really the whole principle of just reading something skimming it picking out the key kind of principles and having a purpose in mind sorry my housemates are hoovering having a key principle in mind and knowing what you what questions you want answered by reading that case i.e if it's for a seminar you need a limited amount of information but if it's for an actual essay you need to know it all you can kind of apply that like ethos to textbook reading as well and go by subheadings and things like that so i hope you found this video interesting i hope it helped if you have any questions or comments about what i've said then please feel free to put them in the comments box below and i will see you next time i'll see in the next video bye guys [Music] you

Channel: Chelsie Angeles

Views: 10,452

Rating: 4.9733334 out of 5

Keywords: case law, reading, lawyer, law school, university, tips, advice, study

Id: dYa8cKwwOsM

Length: 6min 12sec (372 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020