Is It Time to Give Law School Casebooks a Decent Burial?
A conference to be held in Seattle later this month could be the beginning of the end for the traditional law school casebook.
Such weighty tomes are cumbersome, expensive and unnecessary at a time when electronic communication is commonplace, especially among the younger generation, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. So law school, casebook publishers and e-reader manufacturers plan to gather on Sept. 27 to explore alternatives.
One idea would be to let law professors create their own electronic books in less than an hour, by selecting a structure of cases, theories and lectures, says Ronald Collins of the First Amendment Center in Washington, D.C.
“It’s strange that kids that text message and carry iPods and BlackBerrys in their left hand carry in their right hands these heavy tomes called law school books,” he tells the newspaper. “The left hand is the future and the right hand is the past.”
