There are many opportunities for change in legal education. An area ripe for innovation is the law school casebook. Technological advances have made epublishing feasible for just about anyone, the content is primarily public domain legal information and skyrocketing prices mean that students’ finances are impacted immediately upon purchase.
Here at CALI we’ve been working to change the way legal educational materials are published with our eLangdell Press. Through it we publish law professor authored casebooks, individual casebook chapters, statutory and regulatory supplements and federal rules of procedure. Everything published on the site features a creative commons license and is free for students and faculty to download, remix and reuse.
Our philosophy of “open publishing” extends to the format of our books. There’s no DRM, so once you download it, it’s yours forever. Whenever possible, we publish in .epub, .mobi, .pdf and .docx so that they are compatible with a wide variety of eReaders, tablets and computers. We even have print via print on demand service Lulu.com since we know that not everyone is comfortable or has access to personal computers or printers. Those are sold at cost and we make absolutely no profit on them.
If you haven’t looked at eLangdell Press lately, I encourage you to check it out! It now boasts 29 titles with many more planned. We’ve also made some improvements and innovations to the eLangdell Press Bookstore that should make it easier to review the materials and use them, as well as just some general housekeeping to the site. These updates include:
- The ability to preview and read the book within your web browser using our new CALI reader. See the preview of Basic Income Tax by William Kratzke as an example.
- New author profile pages that provide some information about the author. See Professor Verkerke’s for an example.
- A refresh of the book pages that includes more prominent author info placed below the title with link to new author profile page,
organization of download and purchase links below the description, repositioning of CC license info to try and make it more clear that it refers to the book, year of publication, added word counts, and PDF page counts. - New covers for all of the ebooks and lulu print books that conform with the expected appearance of law school casebooks and supplements.
- Extending the main page so that all titles appear on the front page of the site.
Stay tuned for more innovations and titles! eLangdell is always expanded and adapting. If you have any suggestions or questions, please let us know!
Also, we will posting a Call for Proposals later this month. Until then, our requirements for proposals can be viewed on the Become an Author page on the eLangdell website.
