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10 J. Legal Educ. 406 (1957-1958)
Cases on the Law of Torts by Leon Green, Wex S. Malone, Willard H. Pedrick, James A. Rahl

handle is hein.journals/jled10 and id is 418 raw text is: JOURNAL OF LEGAL EDUCATION [VOL. 10 CASES ON THE LAw oF TORTS. By Leon Green, Wex S. Malone, Willard H. Pedrick, James A. Rahl. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1957. Pp. xxxvi, 855. $12.00. A traditional and oft-repeated lament of law firms is that the fledgling attorney, fresh out of school, does not have an adequate grasp of the impor- tance of the facts in dealing with legal problems and, moreover, knows little of the practical, everyday tricks of the trade. The law school grad- uate, it is said, is deficient in such skills as collecting the raw facts, sifting the relevant from the irrelevant, preparing witnesses to testify to the rele- vant facts in a forceful manner, choosing the appropriate doctrinal pigeon- holes into which to fit the facts, negotiating with opposing counsel and in- surance company representatives, preparing pleadings and related papers, conducting examinations before trial, and trying cases.1 In general, legal educators appear to take the view that the lament of the law firms, while perhaps a little exaggerated, has considerable basis in fact.2 Expanded use of trial and appellate moot courts and legal aid clinics, stronger emphasis upon legal writing, and greater use of practicing lawyers as instructors in specialized seminars are some of the techniques which the educators are employing in an effort to narrow the conceded gap between the law in school and the law in practice. The current work of Professors Green, Malone, Pedrick, and Rahl ap- pears to be, among other things, an attempt so to present the law of torts to students as more effectively to equip them to deal with the tort problems with which they may be confronted later on in practice. High praise is due the authors merely for making such an attempt, for although the casebook is purportedly the backbone of legal education, too little effort has been ex- pended to utilize its potential for presenting the law in terms of the real- ities of practice. There will doubtless be considerable disagreement as to how effective the attempt of Dean Green and his colleagues has been in achieving this objective, but there can be no dispute that their work will be an important stimulus to the thinking of educators and a challenge to them to modify conventional modes of approach and to strike out on newer paths. The present book is a revision of Dean Green's Judicial Process in Tort Cases (2 ed. 1939) and follows his unusual technique of organizing the cases and materials by factual groupings rather than by doctrinal classifications. The theory is, apparently, that cases come to the law practitioner in the form of masses of facts, without legal labels affixed to them, and that stu- dents should, therefore, be taught to approach cases from the standpoint of their factual settings. The general outlines of this approach may be grasped by reference to the book's table of contents, which, somewhat abridged, is as follows: 1 See e.g., Roberts, Performance Courses in the Study of Law: A Proposal for Reform of Legal Education, 36 A.B.A.J. 17 (1950); Cantrall, Economic Inventory of the Legal Profession: Lawyers Can Take Lesson fron Doctors, 38 A.B.A.J. 196 (1952); Cantrall, Law Schools and the Laynan: Is Legal Education Doing Its Job? 38 A.B.A.J. 907 (1952). 2 See, e.g., McClain, Is Legal Education Doing Its Job? A Reply, 39 A.B.A.J. 120 (1953).

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