If I were to be completely honest about it, I’d say that I went through at least a third of my undergraduate law degree in virtual ignorance of the one thing you would expect a law student to know quite a bit about: case law. I didn’t really know how to find case law. When I did find it, I didn’t really know how to use it. I certainly didn’t know where it came from (or rather, I didn’t know where the law reports I was required to read came from).
Now, I’m not one of those people who studied law before the internet age. In fact, I studied law slap-bang in the middle of the internet age. As a student, I had access to all the Westlaws and LexisNexises you could shake your lecture notes at. I had it very easy, and maybe that was the problem. I couldn’t find an actual printed law report on a library shelf. I couldn’t really tell where the headnote ended and where the judgment began. I didn’t even know what a ‘headnote’ was.
