Criminal Law Textbooks and Human Betterment

Anders Walker makes several fascinating observations about the contents of textbooks and how they relate to competing visions of what courses in substantive criminal law should seek to accomplish. He advances at least two theses. He states that “every year” (1) “thousands of law students graduate thinking that they have studied criminal law using the case method, when they have not”; and (2) “the same law students graduate thinking that they have been trained for criminal practice, when they have not.” These theses require a bit of modification, for Walker is not really interested in what students think. He offers no empirical evidence, for example, that students are systematically misled. I suspect that many students are explicitly informed that their course in criminal law will not adequately prepare them for criminal practice, and they cannot help but notice that their textbook devotes less space to cases than their textbooks in torts, contracts or property. If I am mistaken, and surveys indicate that recent graduates have false beliefs about these matters, more candor would easily remedy their misconceptions. The fact that Walker does not recommend that we professors be more forthright suggests that he is not really worried about truth in advertising. Thus I will suppose that Walker’s theses are better construed to be about reality rather than belief. I will interpret him to contend that students (1) do not read enough cases in criminal law; and (2) are poorly prepared for careers in criminal practice. Why do these two theses merit a special symposium in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law? I cannot imagine that many full-time criminal law faculty would dispute them. What I take to be valuable about Walker’s contribution is twofold. First, he offers a novel historical explanation of how these theses came to be true. According to Walker, Herbert Wechsler played a pivotal role in contributing to our predicament. Wechsler not only created the blueprint that most subsequent textbooks would follow, but did so with a conscious purpose. He de-emphasized cases and included more (non-case) materials precisely because he wanted to discourage criminal practice. Instead of training legal professionals, he hoped to lead students to appreciate the “integration of law and social science.” Why would a law professor edit and adopt a textbook with the objective of steering students away from careers in penal practice? According to Walker, Wechsler “rejected the case method for political reasons.” He was distressed by the