Critique-inspired pedagogies in Canadian criminal law casebooks: Challenging "doctrine first, critique second" approaches to first-year law teaching

This article is a critical evaluation of Canadian criminal law casebooks. The author explores the aims, practices, and challenges of these teaching texts by examining their relationship to critique-inspired pedagogical methods. A number of English-language Canadian criminal law casebooks add a welcome feature to the Canadian common law teaching landscape: all but one of six recently published casebooks teach doctrine and critique together. The research builds on an emerging scholarship of Canadian legal education by demonstrating evidence of critical political commitments and critique-inspired teaching methods within Canadian criminal law education. Yet casebook editors and other professors who utilize critical methods acknowledge challenges of teaching doctrine from critical standpoints. These discoveries lead the author to suggest that emphasizing the goals of teaching critique, including producing more effective lawyers and creating learning environments that value student diversity, will be helpful for moving forward with critique-inspired teaching.