Open Access to Legal Instructional Materials

[richards1000@comcast.net]

Colleagues:

  This week there was an interesting development in open-access to 
legal educational materials. The Legal Education Commons, 
http://w.cali.org/lec , a source of open-access, full-text 
teaching materials for law school courses, was launched on 
January 26 by the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction 
(CALI) and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. See 
the CALI announcement here, 
http://www2.cali.org/index.php?fuseaction=pages.news&PHPSESSID=608277c566ab4ad5abd34c6a08dff119#212 
, and the Berkman announcement here, 
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/5014 . The Legal Education 
Commons (LEC) reportedly contains more than 700,000 full text 
cases and other court documents, plus approximately 300 
illustrations from CALI tutorials. The copyrighted materials in 
the Commons are governed by a Creative Commons Attribution 
Share-Alike license (BY-SA), 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ .

The LEC seems to reflect two trends in legal publishing: a 
movement toward use of less formalized, customizable, 
practice-oriented materials in instruction (of which Professor 
Doug Leslie's Casefile Method product, 
http://www.casefilemethod.com/ offers a commercial example) ; and 
an interest on the part of some law professors and librarians in 
utilizing open-access approaches to legal publishing.

Rob Richards

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Robert C. Richards, Jr., J.D.*, M.S.L.I.S., M.A.
Philadelphia, PA
richards1000@comcast.net *
Member New York bar, retired status. 
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