Mayer: A Proposal for Nonmarket Social Production of Legal Casebooks

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.

To Be Published in May 2012: Rubin, ed.: Legal Education in the Digital Age

Professor Edward L. Rubin of Vanderbilt University Law School has edited Legal Education in the Digital Age (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in May 2012).

Here is the table of contents:

Part I. Creating Digital Teaching Materials:

1. The digital path of the law. Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover

2. Open source and the reinvention of legal education. Matthew T. Bodie

3. Copyright and innovation in legal course materials. R. Anthony Reese

Part II. Teaching with Digital Course Materials:

4. Digital evolution in law school course books: trade-offs, opportunities and vigilance. Lawrence A. Cunningham

5. Smarter law school casebooks. John Palfrey

6. Law games: the importance of virtual worlds and video games for the future of legal education. Gregory Silverman

7. Law students and the new law library: an old paradigm. Penny Hazelton

Part III. Reforming the Curriculum through Digital Course Materials:

8. Law school 2.0: course books in the digital age. David Vladeck

9. The new course book and the new law school curriculum. Edward Rubin

10. Casebooks, learning theory and the need to manage uncertainty. Peggy Cooper Davis.

Call for Papers: LVI 2011: Law via the Internet Conference

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 15 February 2011 — has been issued for LVI 2011: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 8-10 June 2011, at the University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong, China.

The conference will be hosted by the Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII).

LVI is the conference of the Free Access to Law Movement and the legal information institutes.

For LVI 2011, papers are invited on the following topics:

• Challenges and barriers in free access to law in Asia and elsewhere
• Multi-lingual legal databases and searching
• Legal issues in the provision of free legal information
• Governance and funding models for sustainability of free legal databases
• Making historical legal materials accessible online
• Social networking technologies and their implications for free access to law?
• Keeping track of legislative evolution online
• Quality control and timeliness of online legal services
• Standards for legal information on the web?
• Free access to law as community services
• International law on the web: Treaties, International Courts etc
• Finding law across the web – indexing and searching
• Litigation support on the web
• Innovative uses of online legal data
• Court registries and electronic filing / transactions
• Interactive and ‘intelligent’ legal services on the web
• Teaching law using internet resources
• Automation of large-scale legal data on the web
• Legal publishing via the web

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Steven C. Perkins.

September 21, 2010: Presentation: “Hacking the Casebook”

A presentation about new resources for creating digital legal casebooks, entitled Hacking the Casebook, will be given by the H20 Development Team on 21 September 2010 at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The presentation will be Webcast.

Here is the abstract:

Traditional law school casebooks are expensive, bulky and stagnant. With the support of the HLS Library, Berkman has been updating our suite of classroom tools, H2O, to create an online alternative to casebooks that are free, online and remixable. H2O includes our new tool Collage for editing down and annotating cases, Playlists for aggregating materials, the Question Tool for in-classroom back channel, and the Rotisserie for out-of-class discussion. In this lunch we’ll demo some of the tools (all still in alpha) and show how Jonathan Zittrain‘s Torts class is using them this term.

Mayer on The Future of the Legal Casebook & CALI’s eLangdell Project

John P. Mayer, Executive Director of CALI: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction gave a presentation entitled The Future of the Legal Casebook & CALI’s eLangdell Project at the Chicago Law.gov Workshop, held 21 May 2010 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

In his presentation, Mr. Mayer describes how CALI and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University are applying the open educational resources approach to law school instructional materials, through the eLangdell Project and the Legal Education Commons. The presentation also provides an overview of the current state of law school instructional resources technology — including the use of ebooks in law schools — and the future development of that technology.

Click here for more information about the Law.gov legal open government data project.