Saturday, June 23, 2012

Why would you ever assign a book that cost students money if it is available for free?

eLangdell is offering free Bankruptcy and Securities Law statutory supplement e-books for law school courses; call for textbook proposals

Just finishing up today at the CALI Conference in lovely San Diego at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law.  The new building is super nice if you've not seen it!
The cost of books for our law students is immense.   In case you have not already heard about this from other sources:

CALI publishes free, open books for legal education in electronic and print formats through eLangdell® Press http://elangdell.cali.org/ These e-books are viewable on computers, iPad, iPhone, Nook, and Kindle, or a student can order at cost a hard copy printed and mailed from Lulu.

CALI has partnered with Cornell’s LII to produce free, open statutory e-book supplements for Bankruptcy and Securities law courses:

Securities Law: Selected Statutes and Regulations
s
U.S. Bankruptcy Code and Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure
      
eLangdell is also publishing open access textbooks distributed under a Creative Commons license, although there are none yet in the Commercial Law field (yet, of course). There are statutory supplements for subjects (evidence, civil procedure, bankruptcy, etc).  If you are looking for a Contracts text for Fall, J.H. Verkerke, University of Virginia, has a new eLangdell book out for Fall 2012 adoption.  If you would like to preview it, contact me at jmartin@stu.edu or Deb Quentel of CALI at dquentel@cali.org.

In case you are interested in writing a text for Commercial Law or another subject . . . There is a call for proposals (deadlines October 1, 2012 and April 1, 2013) for textbooks or individual chapters here: http://elangdell.cali.org/content/write-elangdell-casebook-or-chapter

- jsm