Solution: Two under-appreciated but promising projects are currently under development: the H20 Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center and eLangdell at the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction. Both initiatives are open access, open law projects meant to obviate the printed legal casebook.
Though few realize, the legal casebook is predominantly public domain. That is, any legal case in the U.S. is free of copyright. Those leather-bound books, which 1Ls nationwide buy from WestLaw and AspenLaw are the equivalent of printed and bound copies of Wikipedia to be sold door-to-door. While casebooks are, of course, edited and compiled by experts, H20’s creators point to the value of a broad community of expertise. As James Surowiecki teaches,communities produce better results over time than any one subject-expert.*
What Berkman legal scholars Zittrain, Lessig, Nesson and others are doing is allowing professors to curate and comment on any case ton create a veritable “playlist” of case law for their students to annotate and share among or across classes and campuses.
Citation: Andrew Magliozzi
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