Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week, I'm getting a tutorial on open casebooks from John Mayer, the executive director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction. Are they the wave of the future? Next up is a look at the time that legendary Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau took down a former Harvard Law School dean.

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

 

The Case For Open Casebooks

How can law schools collectively wipe out $150 million in student costs annually? By adopting the widespread use of open casebooks, according to John Mayer, the executive director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, which is better known as CALI.  I'm sure most lawyers today still remember lugging around those weighty tomes packed with court decisions. But digital versions, which are lighter, cheaper, and easier to adapt and keep current, are they the wave of the future? Mayer thinks so, and he has made me a believer.

But let me back up. Confession time: I didn't know much about open casebooks before I hopped on a webinar offered last week by the Association of American Law School's Technology Section featuring Mayer making his (compelling) case for open casebooks. For those who are unfamiliar, CALI is a non-profit that has been focused on how to incorporate technology into legal education since 1982 (!).

The way Mayer sees it, open casebooks are beneficial to law students, law faculty and legal education as a whole by reducing casebook costs, giving professors the ability to easily adapt casebooks to their needs, and letting students access casebooks in the format they prefer, among other things.

So, what, exactly, are open casebooks? In a nutshell, they eliminate the traditional textbook publishing model, where a single author writes the text, and a publisher sells or rents the casebooks to individual students.

➤➤They're casebooks compiled by a primary author and put online for anyone to access for free or at a very low cost.

➤➤Since the casebooks exist digitally, professors can easily update them with new cases or tailor the casebooks to only include the chapters they intend to teach. Open casebooks aren't controlled by a traditional publisher; thus, anyone can add to or modify them without asking for permission.

➤➤Open casebooks mean students can have their own copies, and they can reuse them without repurchasing.

In fact, CALI already offers several hundred open casebooks on the law—the result of a project it launched in 2006 dubbed eLangdell. (The name was chosen as an homage to Christopher Columbus Langdell, pioneer of the casebook. Mayer said he's confident Langdell would approve of the concept.) And CALI is looking to expand that trove—it's accepting pitches from authors who want to write an open casebook.

So what's in it for the law students? Here are the pros, according to Mayer.

➤➤The obvious benefit is that open casebooks are far cheaper that traditional ones, and students can easily carry them anywhere on laptops and tablets.

➤➤Open casebooks offer many options for annotating and tracking text, and students can download the casebooks in a variety of different formats, depending on their personal preferences. Students who prefer paper books can have the open casebooks printed at far lower costs than those of a traditional casebook. They can even convert the text into audio and listen to it or drop it into a Google Doc to share notes with their study group.

The ability to customize casebooks is the major upside for law professors, Mayer said. Open casebooks can easily be whittled down, reordered or combined with other open casebooks. Professors can customize them in different ways, such as adding their own annotations. And again, they can do it themselves without having to jump through hoops with a traditional publisher.

Of course, the financial picture is different as well. With free and low-cost open casebooks, there's simply not as much money to be made from writing a text—so you can expect traditional textbook publishers to fight this trend. Instead of royalties tied to casebook sales, authors of open textbooks would negotiate a one-time fee upfront with the publisher, CALI for instance.

The takeaway: The final leg of Mayer's three-pronged pitch for open casebooks is that the law is changing so quickly that schools need a better way to quickly adapt and update casebooks. To be fair, many electronic casebooks are already out there. That is: digital versions of traditional casebooks that offer added features and can be more easily updated with new content. Yet those books still cost a lot and take longer to update due to the bureaucracy of traditional publishers (and the schedule of the book's author). And students deserve to be able to have casebooks in whatever format they learn best from, not the format established by a publisher, Mayer argues. I think the transition to open casebooks makes a lot of sense, if for no other reason than that $250 or so a pop for traditional casebooks is pretty hard to swallow.

 

An Ex-Harvard Law Dean On The Wrong Side of the Law

There has been no shortage of homages to former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau since his death on July 21. Many people know that he was the inspiration for the hard-charging prosecutor Adam Schiff on the long-running show Law & Order, and that he took on the likes of organized crime boss John Gotti and former Tyco International CEO Dennis Kozlowski. But did you also know that he sent a former Harvard Law dean to jail for 30 days?  Here's the deal: James Landis was quite the political muckety-muck in his day. He was an adviser to three presidents (FDR, Truman and JFK) and served stints on both the FTC and the SEC. He was also the dean of his alma mater Harvard Law School from 1937 to 1946.

But from 1956 to 1960, he failed to pay his federal income taxes and Morgenthau—a Yale Law alum who was then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York—brought tax evasion charges against Landis in 1963. It probably would not have made for a very compelling Law & Order episode, though. Landis pleaded guilty and received a 30-day jail sentence, most of which he served in a New York area hospital. He also paid more than $90,000 in back taxes and penalties and lost his license to practice law for a year. Landis died the following year, apparently after suffering a heart attack in his swimming pool.

I guess that offers further proof that Morgenthau wasn't afraid to go after well-connected, big names.

Extra Credit Reading

July 19 marked the five-year anniversary of the shooting of Florida State University law professor Dan Markel and his family and friends are still awaiting justice.

Students at Penn Law are asking that controversial professor Amy Wax be stripped of her teaching duties after speaking on a panel about immigration at a national conference of conservatives last week.

Pepperdine University School of Law Dean Paul Caron has been writing his influential TaxProf Blog for 15 years and has no intention of stopping.

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I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]