IT's been a really interesting discussion regarding the use of edited vs. unedited cases -- Daniel Solove's added some thoughts on the debate at Concurring Opinions as well. Orin's last comment:

"In my view, a well-edited case still requires the student to do all the work that you think is so important. It may be that you have had unfortunate experience with over-edited cases, in which they just had the facts and the holding. Or it may be that there are some particularly incoherent opinions in the areas that you teach. But in my view, none of the skills you mention are less well raised when a student reads 5 well-edited cases as compared to 2 or 3 unedited cases. Indeed, I think the contrary is true.

Perhaps we're really just bickering about matters of degree, though. In particular, you say in your original post that you try to choose unedited cases that don't have too much irrelevant stuff in them. I gather you do that for precisely the reason that I think edited cases are better; you think too much irrelevant stuff is distracting and useless to assign. If so, perhaps our differences are more narrow that it appears.

I think that's a fair comment, and I think it usefully pinpoints our disagreement. "None of the skills you mention are less well raised when a student reads 5 well-edited cases as compared to 2 or 3 unedited cases." If one of the skills I'm talking about is "learning how to sort out the irrelevant from the relevant," having an editor sort it out for you does not help you learn it, even if you read 100 edited opinions.
At the same time, I do acknowledge that truly irrelevant stuff is distracting, and that sometimes getting rid of it does help students focus on the task at hand. Our definitions of the "truly irrelevant," though, are probably worlds apart; very, very little falls in that category for me, while I suspect that a good deal more stuff falls in that category for Orin.