Goodenough and Purdom on Reimagining Legal Education

Professor Oliver Goodenough of Vermont Law School and Harvard’s Berkman Center Law Lab, and Assistant Dean Rebecca Purdom of Vermont Law School, have published Reimagining Legal Education, Huffington Post, 5 September 2012.

Summary:

[...] We need to invent ways to realize the goals of modern [legal] education in the new [technological] modalities and forms on their own terms, uncoupled from the old structures of classroom, text, and homework. In the process, we will create new forms of pedagogy and new goals for learning that will connect our students with a richer, more nuanced, and increasingly capable understanding of the complicated world of 21st century law. [...]

As an example the authors describe a law-school evidence course in which the content is delivered via an interactive computer game.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Goodenough and Lauritsen, eds.: Educating the Digital Lawyer

Professor Oliver Goodenough of Vermont Law School and Harvard’s Berkman Center Law Lab, and Marc Lauritsen, Esq., of Capstone Practice Systems have edited a new book entitled Educating the Digital Lawyer (New Providence, NJ: Matthew Bender, 2012).

Click here to access an EPUB ebook version of the book free of charge. (If you need an EPUB reader, try the Firefox EPUB Reader extension.)

According to the introduction, the book chapters are based on papers presented at “a pair of conferences — one in October 2010 at Harvard Law School and one in April 2011 at Columbia Law School — that brought together several dozen academics and practitioners who are deeply interested in the technology of law and how law schools and other institutions should educate students and lawyers about it.”

Here is the table of contents:

• Brian Donnelly, What Does “Digital Lawyer” Mean?
• Marc Lauritsen, Lawyering in an Age of Intelligent Machines
• David M. Blaszkowsky and Matthew Reed, Meta-What? Lawyers, Legal Training, and the Rise of Meta-Data for Digital Securities and Other Financial Contracts
• Harry Lewis, Under the Hood of the Internet
• Jeanne Eicks, Educating Superior Legal Professionals: Successful Modern Curricula Join Law and Technology
• Brock Rutter, Survey of Existing Courses in Lawyer Use of Technology
• Fred Galves, Teaching Litigation Technology
• Ronald W. Staudt, Cyberclinics: Law Schools, Technology, and Justice
• Paul Maharg, Simulation: A Pedagogy Emerging from the Shadows
• Stephanie Kimbro, What Should Be in a Digital Curriculum: A Practitioner’s Must Have List
• Barbara L. Bernier and F. Dennis Green, Law School Reset — Pedagogy, Andragogy, and Second Life
• Michael G. Bennett, A Critical Embracing of the Digital Lawyer
• Gregg Gordon, The Digital Lawyer’s Evolving Education in Scholarly Research

HT @stephkimbro.

Digital Law Library Wiki: Berkman Center Law Lab Launches Prototype

The Law Lab of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has announced the launch of a prototype of its Digital Law Library wiki.

The prototype currently covers primarily the law of Senegal.

The purpose of the prototype is to provide access to primary and secondary “Senegalese and other West African [legal resources] online in a searchable and easily accessible format.”

The prototype was developed by the Law Lab in collaboration with Le Centre de Recherche, d’Etude et de Documentation sur les Institutions et les Législations Africaines (CREDILA).

For more information, please see the Law Lab’s Digital Law Library site and the announcement.

Goodenough on The Digital LLC

An audio podcast is now available of a discussion by Professor Oliver Goodenough of Vermont Law School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, about the Berkman Center’s Digital LLC Project, held 28 July 2010 on Radio Berkman. Here is a description of the project:

Digital LLC is an open-source software that provides entrepreneurs with the tools to take advantage of Vermont’s recent ground-breaking legislation allowing “virtual LLCs” and “virtual corporations” to achieve full legal status and to exist entirely in digital form. Digital LLC guides entrepreneurs in building the two main components that govern the management of an LLC: the Operating Agreement and the Articles of Organization. Once these key documents are agreed upon by the designated LLC members, the software allows users to make all management decisions digitally for the entire existence of the LLC.

Digital LLC has the potential to lower barriers to entry, streamline execution, and import better institutions to side-step local limitations, making a whole new cooperative relationship possible.

Click here for more information about The Digital LLC Project.