If you are unfamiliar with law school casebooks, publishers tend to frequently publish new versions of a casebook. In the new version small mistakes are corrected, new cases are added, and some problems are updated. But the structure is generally the same and surprisingly little is changed from the previous version.

If you have been shopping online for casebooks you may have noticed that older versions are much, much cheaper than the newest version. Knowing that little changes from version to version you may wonder how easy it is to get by in a class with the old version of the casebook.

My Experience
I actually got by using an older version of a casebook in a professional responsibility class. I had bought the wrong version by accident online There were a few annoyances, but it didn't hurt me at all in the class.

At the least using older version casebooks results in being unable to pinpoint a certain page quickly because the older version's pages are always different from the new version's. At the worst it results in missing out on some important updated information that is only in the newest version.

Advice
I would not suggest buying the older version of a book even to save a decent amount of money. It gets to be a bit of a hassle when the professor says turn to X page and you always turn to the wrong page. Plus in the worst case scenario you could end up missing out on important information.