About the program
Most people who struggle with case law are not struggling with the law itself. They are struggling with the format. Judgments are long, the structure is non-linear, and the actual legal rule is often buried under pages of procedural history and obiter remarks.
What the course actually covers
We start with the anatomy of a judgment: headnotes, facts, issues, holdings, and reasoning. Then we move to identifying the ratio decidendi versus obiter dicta, which sounds straightforward until you try it with a split decision from the Supreme Court of Canada.
Participants work through a series of real cases across contract, tort, and constitutional law. Each session asks you to locate the operative rule, trace how earlier cases were treated, and predict how the decision might be applied to a hypothetical. The focus is analytical, not memorization.
Distinguishing cases and why it matters in practice
A large portion of the course deals with how lawyers use prior decisions to argue both sides of a dispute. You will read cases that seem identical on the surface but were decided differently, and you will have to explain why. This is where legal reasoning actually lives.
By the end, you will be able to read a 60-page decision and extract its legal significance in under 20 minutes.
No prior legal training required. Comfort with reading dense text is helpful.