Teaching Tools for Law School Faculty

"This Article makes the case for switching [to open-source casebooks], then outlines practical strategies for easing the transition, whether by adopting modules from existing casebooks, or by cloning books and adopting them as your own."

This article describes ways in which the Boston College Law Library and the FIU Law Library have provided license content for use in courses offered at their law schools.

This article includes an overview of affordable course content options for legal educators.

Part III examines selected OER options for law school courses, including self-publishing platforms, open-source repositories, and course management solutions.

CALI's eLangdell® Press publishes free, open eBooks for legal education. Faculty members can adopt and edit the Creative Commons licensed casebooks for free, and there is no charge for students' use.

H2O is a suite of online classroom tools developed and provided by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Library. H2O allows professors to freely develop, remix, and share online textbooks under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License (per the Terms of Service).

The LiveCarta catalog includes free or low-cost digital casebooks created by law professors. Students also have the option of purchasing low-cost print copies of the texts.

A collaboration between MIT Press and the Harvard Law Library, "the Open Casebook series leverages free and open texts created by distinguished legal scholars on Harvard’s H2O platform." The series will include textbooks for all standard first-year law school courses. Digital versions are freely available, with low-cost print copies available for purchase.

The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.

Show Me Criminal Procedure, authored by two University of Missouri School of Law professors, is a criminal procedure casebook available at no charge under a Creative Commons license.

This page provides information on publishing an open text with CALI's eLangdell Press.

American University's Washington College of Law, and NC State University Libraries, along with other academic contributors, have published this report, which aims to assist OER authors, adapters, and adopters in evaluating when and how they can incorporate third party copyright materials into their open works. The report is the culmination of workshops, interviews, and webinars conducted over a two-year period from 2019-2020.

H2O helps instructors create customized textbooks. You can use H2O to: Create a digitial textbook or casebook, or adapt an existing digital textbook/casebook; annotate, highlight, and edit cases and materials; and export materials into Word for printing or reformatting.

The FAQ includes a section on publishing an open or low-cost text with LiveCarta.

University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing supports the publication of both scholarly and instructional materials, including open educational resources and open textbooks.

The LiveCarta catalog includes free or low-cost digital casebooks created by law professors. Students also have the option of purchasing low-cost print copies of the texts.

A collaboration between MIT Press and the Harvard Law Library, "the Open Casebook series leverages free and open texts created by distinguished legal scholars on Harvard’s H2O platform." The series will include textbooks for all standard first-year law school courses. Digital versions are freely available, with low-cost print copies available for purchase.

Semaphore Press, founded by two law professors, publishes legal casebooks for digital download. The suggested price for a full casebook is $30.00.