Legal Education
Is It Time to Give Law School Casebooks a Decent Burial?
Posted Sep 12, 2008, 02:34 pm CST
By Martha Neil
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."
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Comments
Posted by Broke_Law_student - 2 months, 3 weeks, 13 hours, 4 minutes ago
Books are good. But they’re too damn expensive.
Posted by Yevgeny Ioffe - 2 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 19 hours, 31 minutes ago
This just another evidence of the trend of dumbing down of America. Why read books anymore?!
Posted by anonymous - 2 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 16 hours, 34 minutes ago
It has nothing to do with the “dumbing down of America” and everything to do with creating a cheaper alternative that is in line with today’s technological advances. I fail to see how anyone could see a problem with this. Unless you publish casebooks for a living.
Posted by dude - 2 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 10 hours, 16 minutes ago
Textbooks are tooooooo expensive. THis option would allow the student to print off copies as the class goes along. You could buy a box of white paper and buy a good printer. Students would save $100s of dollars. You could take the printed pages to Kinkos and have them bound. aheck, you could even put 2 or more pages on 1 white page. THis means that a book could be printed with at least 50% less paper. Moreover, it would be more environmental friendly b/c less trees would have to die. Everyone wins save the publishers.
Posted by associate - 2 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 19 hours, 5 minutes ago
Printed media will never go out of style. The battery doesn’t die, and dropping it won’t hurt it.
I routinely print out long readings because it’s easier on the eyes than monitors are.
What will eventually change is the structure of the casebook. They will eventually be written like briefs that explain the current state of the law instead of intentionally confusing students with antiquated concepts that aren’t even discussed in practice anymore.
Posted by Alicia - 2 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 18 hours, 23 minutes ago
Being a current law school student, i can say right now i never carry around casebooks and i sit in class, with my laptop, and pull them up on westlaw. This is only a positive movement. I wish this movement would have happened in time for me to benefit!
Posted by grammarian - 2 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 16 hours, 19 minutes ago
Fewer trees, not “less trees.“
Posted by dave - 2 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 12 hours, 39 minutes ago
I had a professor in law school who used this same method- you got a list of case names and citations on the first day of class and were expected to get them yourself- as in how it used to be before case books came out.
On one hand, it saved me some money, on the other I spent 3 times longer trying to read the full text version of the cases than I would have if we had had an edited casebook.
And I think I qualify in that younger generation they are talking about here, and I don’t text message, use facebook, and never once took a laptop to class. There is something to be said for handwritten notes, the feel of a book, the scent of the library, and the lack of distractions from IM, youtube, and playing solitare.