The hereness and nowness of things is something they know all about. . . . The discovery was a real find. Reading lawyer stories along with cases takes you along the backroads of legal education and offers a somewhat different view of the world. A case cites other cases, the judge relies upon existing cases to create the case opinion to resolve the dispute before her. The meaning of the case, the new case and the old cases, is always read in light of cases that proceeded it.
Law students learn to read cases, looking backward, looking forward.
Reading lawyer stories follows a similar path. I suspect, however, that reading law cases, given the present state of legal education, will not have materially advanced either your willingness to read lawyer stories or your ability to know what to do with them once you have read them. Indeed, law school may have seriously impeded your ability to read lawyer stories. For some, a constant diet of case reading makes it difficult to read anything other than law cases. A Dramatist's Dilemma Greek dramatists of tragedy confronted a problem in how to prepare their audience for the drama they were to witness.