The Evolvement Of Case Methods In The American Higher Education Context

American Case Methods refer to teaching methods, coming from the real cases, which the teachers use during the law courses. Through the use of the Case methods combined with the Socratic method, this teaching strategy has become the most popular in cultivating students to master the ability of educated logic skills, language skills and legal skills. Nowadays it is one of the most popular teaching methods used in the American Law Schools. Although, it should be mentioned that this method is not used in the United States to develop the legal education, but to study the Evolution of Case methods in the American area, legal education being also content-connected with the teaching method of Mentoring and Clinic Legal Education. The evolution of Case methods has undergone three stages including: genesis, development process and maturity.By using the literature method and historical research method, meaning the evolution mainline of Case methods, we have focused on the principles of legislation and Higher Education to analyze how American Case Methods evolved. After a thorough analysis, we came to the conclusion that there are 8 factors that contributed to the development of the Case method: applying the dimensions of Case Methods, the teaching legislation contents, legal research methods, the educational thought, the philosophy of Law, the American vocational education, and the main social function of higher education. Further on, we analyzed the tendency of Case teaching method’s evolvement, and found that the teaching method is turning to diversification and tends to using teaching and cases method together, the teaching theory is turning to make theory method and practice method together.The tendency can help our country from the following points of view: a.The improvement of the existing elective course teaching method; b.Different grades students for different teaching method; c.The theoretical and practical combination for the text book; d.Make a professional teaching methods training for the law school teachers.