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