The Case Method as a Form of Communication

Abstract

The case method encourages poor writing through the assumption that to be challenging, the case can never be straightforward. The struggle, how ever, is often stylistic, rather than intellectual in nature. Coupled with problems of writing are formalistic problems of interpretation: unclear cases become a maze from which there is no appeal to external authority. What is needed is a consensus that cases should be as well-written as other forms of scholarship.