Several Articles on Legal Educational Technology (Papers from BILETA 2012) in New Issue of EJLT

The new issue of European Journal of Law and Technology (Volume 4, Number 1, 2013) is a special issue that contains several papers on legal educational technology, first presented at BILETA 2012: Conference of the British & Irish Legal Educational Technology Association, held 29-30 March 2012 in Newcastle, England, UK.

Here are the contents related to legal educational technology:

• Jonathan Bainbridge, Karen Counsell, Freda Grealy, Paul Maharg, Joel Mills, Rory O’Boyle: iPads in Legal Learning (iLEGALL): mobile devices in professional legal learning
• Wai Shun Chow & Firew Kebede Tiba: Professional Legal Education Reviews: Too Many “What”s, Too Few “How”s.
• Graeme Broadbent & Pamela Sellman: Images of Law and Legal Education: Law School websites and the provision of information
• Janice Ann Denoncourt: Using Film to Enhance Intellectual Property Law Education: Getting the Message Across
• Patricia McKellar & Steven Warburton: Developing an e-reader and e-publishing model for flexible and open learning on a distance learning LLB programme
• Antoinette Muntjewerff: CASE reading, structuring and analyzing decisions by judges
• Philip Leith & Cynthia Fellows: BAILII, Legal Education and Open Access to Law
• Emily Allbon: Too cool for (law) school? Using technology to engage students in legal skills
• Sandra Meredith: Critical review of referencing software when used with OSCOLA

HT @nzjudi

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.

CALICon 2012: Conference for Law School Computing, 21-23 June 2012

CALICon 2012: The Conference for Law School Computing, is being held 21-23 June 2012 at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California, USA.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #CALIcon12.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for descriptions of accepted presentations.

Masters: The Future of The Legal (Case)Book Is The Web

Elmer Masters, Esq., of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) has posted The Future of the (Case)Book Is the Web, at the CALI Spotlight Blog.

In this post, Elmer advocates the publication of free and open legal casebooks on the free Web, using the open EPUB format. He describes CALI’s eLangdell legal open educational resource service as an example of this approach.

For more information, please see the complete post.

U.S. Bankruptcy Code in ePUB and Kindle Formats

Scott Cromar of the University of Illinois College of Law has created free-of-charge versions of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in ePUB and Kindle e-book formats.

These e-books are published on the site of the Credit Slips blog.

These publications are the latest in a series of free e-book publications of U.S. primary legal materials in the open ePUB format. These publications include CALI’s Free Law Reporter and the joint Legal Information Institute-CALI Federal Rules E-Books.

HT Prof. Robert Lawless.

Danner and Palfrey on Open Access to Legal Information

Senior Associate Dean Richard A. Danner of the Duke University School of Law, and Vice Dean John G. Palfrey of the Harvard Law School, presented papers at a program on Open Access to Legal Information, at CAFLL 2011: The Chinese and American Forum on Legal Information and Law Libraries, on 22 July 2011, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

For full text of the papers, please contact the authors.

Click here for the conference program.

June 23-25: CALICon 2011: Conference on Law School Computing

CALICON 2011: The Conference on Law School Computing, will be held June 23-25, 2011, at Marquette University Law School, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.

The conference is organized by CALI: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction.

Click here for the conference program, which includes presentations and panels on many recent legal technology developments.

Click here for live Webcasts of conference events.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #calicon11.

Conference: The Future of Law Libraries: The Future Is Now?

A conference entitled The Future of Law Libraries: The Future Is Now? will be held 16 June 2011 at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Click here for the conference Webcast.

Twitter tweets from the conference are archived here in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #foll11.

Click here for the conference program.

The conference will cover the following topics:

• The Law.gov legal open government data movement
• Open access law journals
• Open legal collections
• Collaborative work in law libraries
• e-Casebooks and open legal educational resources
• Human resources requirements for law libraries

New on VoxPopuLII: Mayer on The Free Law Reporter

John Mayer of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), has posted The Free Law Reporter – Open Access to the Law and Beyond, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Mayer describes The Free Law Reporter, CALI’s new free and open database of decisions from U.S. federal and state courts, built using data from Public.Resource.Org‘s RECOP database. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement.

Mr. Mayer underscores the ebook functionality of Free Law Reporter: the system allows users to automatically transform their Free Law Reporter search results into ebooks in the open EPUB format. These ebooks can be used as casebooks for law school courses, as well as in other applications.

The Free Law Reporter‘s ebook functionality complements CALI’s other legal open educational resource services, the eLangdell free and open digital casebook/textbook service, and the Legal Education Commons, where law professors share their instructional resources online.

Mr. Mayer’s post also discusses the principles underlying The Free Law Reporter. The first of these is the idea that law professors and law librarians should have the freedom to customize databases and course materials to meet the particular needs of their students and the particular objectives of their courses; as Mr. Mayer writes, “Academic law libraries should have free and open access to the law, access that allows them to define and construct the educational environment for law students.”

In addition, Mr. Mayer characterizes The Free Law Reporter as a generative resource, that can foster innovation, creativity, and collaborative effort among law professors, law librarians, and other members of the legal educational community.

Mr. Mayer’s post should be of interest to law professors, law librarians, legal information systems developers, continuing legal education providers, ebook technologists, and the open educational resources community.

Free Law Reporter: CALI’s New Free Law Resource, Built with RECOP Data

CALI, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, has launched The Free Law Reporter (FLR), a new, free, online source of full text U.S. federal and state court decisions, published from January 2011 to the present.

Click here for a list of the content.

FLR contains data from RECOP, The Weekly Report of Current Opinions, distributed by Carl Malamud‘s Public.Resource.Org. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement. FLR appears to be the second service to use RECOP data. The first appears to have been John Joergensen’s State and Federal Caselaw from the RECOP Project, at Rutgers-Camden Law.

The developers of FLR appear to be John Mayer and Elmer Masters of CALI.

FLR offers access to individual court decisions and to ebooks, in the open EPUB format, containing weekly compilations of court decisions from particular U.S. jurisdictions. Click here for 1FLRAlaska.epub, the first FLR ebook compilation from Alaska state courts. According to FLR’s technology page, FLR ebooks are available from the FLR Website and from CALI’s Legal Education Commons.

John Mayer also says: “you can do a search for cases [in FLR] and then download all of the results as an epub file.”

According to FLR’s technology page, FLR ebooks:

can be read on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs and laptops as well as iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. Amazon Kindle support is possible through third party conversion programs like Calibre while we research more direct paths to Kindle support.

FLR uses the Solr open source search engine. Click here for more details on the technology behind FLR.

Click here for Courtney Minick’s informative post about FLR at Justia’s Onward blog.

Click here for Bob Ambrogi’s informative post about FLR at his LawSites blog.