This title is a part of our CasebookPlus™ offering as ISBN 9781636594064. Learn more at Faculty-CasebookPlus.com.

This book incorporates modern pedagogy principles and active learning. It employs a directed reading approach to flip every class session resulting in higher student readiness and doctrinal understanding. Alternative contextualization, spaced repetition and interleaving are employed in every lesson to facilitate student cognitive schema formation. Active learning exercises result in students reading the rules more carefully and creating deeper and more meaningful context for the rules they are learning than when using traditional, passive casebooks. Formative assessment is continuous and expertly incorporated into the book’s structure such that students continuously receive extensive feedback about their learning without any extra labor expenditure on the professor’s part. Because active learning at its core, is a constructivist pedagogy that recognizes student learning is achieved through engagement with content rather than hierarchical delivery of information, every chapter in this book and the accompanying directed reading questions are carefully designed discovery sequence exercises that result in deep and efficient understanding of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the cases interpreting those rules in significantly fewer pages than is possible with traditional casebooks. Finally, the book is deliberately designed to be used in both the traditional law school classroom and in the synchronous or asynchronous online setting if the professor chooses to use online instruction rather than traditional face to face instruction methods.

The teacher’s manual is designed so that even teachers unfamiliar with civil procedure can use only the casebook and teacher’s manual to expertly teach the subject while seamlessly employing modern pedagogy. The teacher’s manual also leaves room for experienced teachers to do this while facilitating optional doctrinal nuance development in response to the directed reading questions.

It is critical for potential adopters to review both the book and the teacher’s manual together when evaluating this title for use in your class. The teacher’s manual can be accessed under the Teaching Resources link to the left.

Read more about this book’s active learning approach here.

Watch our recent webinar with author Rory Bahadur.

Student Evaluations of Directed Reading Course
Civil Procedure Fall 2022 Evaluations
Civil Procedure Spring 2023 Evaluations

Learn more about the Directed Reading Method in the article below:

Bahadur, Rory D. and Franklin, Kris, DIRECTED QUESTIONS A NON-SOCRATIC DIALOGUE ABOUT NON-SOCRATIC TEACHING (August 16, 2021). University of Detroit Mercy Law Review, Vol. 99, No. 1, 2021,
Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906154


Imprint: West Academic Publishing
Series: American Casebook Series
Publication Date: 05/13/2021
Related Subject(s): Professional Identity Formation

Rory D. Bahadur, Washburn University School of Law

CasebookPlus™

This title is available in our CasebookPlus format. CasebookPlus provides support beyond your classroom lectures and materials by offering additional digital resources to you and your students. Anchored by faculty-authored formative self-assessments keyed to our most popular casebooks, CasebookPlus allows students to test their understanding of core concepts as they are learning them in class – on their own, outside of the classroom, with no extra work on your part. CasebookPlus combines three important elements:

  • A new print or digital casebook
  • Access to a downloadable eBook with the ability to highlight and add notes
  • 12-month access to a digital Learning Library complete with:
Multiple-choice self-assessment questions, including:
  • Chapter questions keyed to the casebook
  • Black Letter Law questions (available in select subjects)
  • Subject area review questions for end of semester use
Essay and short answer questions with sample answers and expert commentary, in 1L and select upper-level subjects

Leading digital study aids, an outline starter, and audio lectures in select subjects

Students can still utilize CasebookPlus digital resources if they’ve purchased a used book or are renting their text by purchasing the Learning Library at westacademic.com.

With CasebookPlus, you can customize your students’ learning experience and monitor their performance. The quiz editor allows you to create your own custom quiz set, suppress specific quiz questions or quiz sets, and time-release quiz questions. Additionally, the flexible, customized reporting capability helps you evaluate your students’ understanding of the material and can also help your school demonstrate compliance with the new ABA Assessment and Learning Outcomes standards.

Teacher's Manual

PowerPoint Slides

About the PowerPoint Slides: Some slides have long quotes from the relevant cases and are more text heavy than usual. The goal here is not for students to read the material from the slide but to display the slide so as to orient and focus the students on relevant language in the cases. With the text heavy slides, students should be told to find the language on the slide in their cases. This will help them understand the relevance of the language in the case.

Learn more about this series.