John Mayer of CALI: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, has posted How Law Schools Could Save Students $150 Million (updated), on CALI Spotlight Blog.
In this post Mr. Mayer proposes a cooperative project to create a set of 100 free legal casebooks for use by law students. He proposes that each U.S. law school “nominate just one faculty at that law school to write a casebook and donate that book, in electronic format, to the commons under a Creative Commons license.”
Mr. Mayer proposes a system of fellowships that would give faculty financial support for writing their casebooks, and he suggests that CALI could provide an online system to help nominated faculty find co-authors for their casebooks.
Mr. Mayer’s goal is to generate 100 new casebooks over a three-year period, and to host these casebooks on CALI’s eLangdell Legal Education Commons open legal educational resources platform.
Mr. Mayer’s project seems consistent with models of nonmarket social production or peer production described by Professor Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks as being particularly well suited to the “authoring” of “textbooks and educational materials.”
For more information, please see the compete post.
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