Dirty Little Secret

I think I have stumbled upon a chicanery among the law schools of this great land. Our professors don't assign all this reading to get us to learn the law (that is merely an unintended side effect), rather they do it as part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by the highlighter industry. You know sometime in the mid-80s, there was a cabal between highlighter executives and law school deans:
Highlighter Exec: Welcome gentlemen. How was the blood from your virgin sacrifice... good? Now lets get down to business. How can we make those poor saps use up lots and lots and lots of highlighters?
Dean of Prestigious Law School #1: I've got it! We'll tell them they have to read thousands of pages each semester... you know "for their education" *wink*... and they'll be forced to comply and highlight, HIGHLIGHT AWAY! Not because logic dictates it to be so, but because they will all fear that another student's highlighting will somehow make that other student's grades higher.
Dean of Prestigious Law School #2: We could even plant one student in each section who furiously highlights for every case, and then have our professors call on the Highlighter and then say how brilliant, well thought out, and persuasive the Highlighter's comments were. The rest of the students will follow the Highlighter off the cliff like lemmings.
Hightlighter Exec: I love it. Brilliant!
Deans (simultaneously): Of course its brilliant, we went to law school.
Dean #2: Please excuse us. We have a meeting in a half-hour with representatives from Gilbert, Emanuel, West, and Aspen. We also have to put the fear of God in our students to never use study aides so that they will flock to the bookstore to buy them. BWA HA HA!

Unfortunately, they've got us. How else are we to digest all this material, and then be able to synthesize it later, without using highlighters? I suppose we could take notes... but it's so much easier to highlight... and I think the highlight pushers and the law schools know this.