Contract law teaching teaching from the case law

General contract law, the body of principles applying to the vast majority of contracts, remains an overwhelmingly common law case law-based system of jurisprudence in most parts of the common law world. This chapter begins with a fairly lengthy discussion of the case method of legal education that has predominated in the United States for most of the last century and a half. When recommending how contract law should be taught from case law, it must surely be instructive to begin by considering how and why United States’ law schools came to teach contract law, and indeed almost everything else, in this way. The common law is presented as timeless and unchanging, and judicial determination as a mechanical choice-free process. The lessons to be learned from our study of teaching contract law through cases in the United States have to be fitted into the framework as well as the North American JD.