Legal Commentary

Christine Hurt has an interesting post at The Glom, asking about the norms surrounding the use of other professors' syllabi and exams.  It does seem hard to believe that the lifting of a syllabus from another professor (especially in the law world where there are limited numbers of casebooks that people adopt -- and a small number of ways to read them) could be deemed plagiarism.  This is especially so if each individual professor tailors the "boiler-plate" accordingly.

But the exam question is a harder one.  On the one hand, writing good exams is one of our hardest jobs -- and one of the easiest ones to mess up.  Since we owe our students well-designed exams, it seems hard to argue that every new professor must start from scratch and learn the hard way just how tough it is.  Indeed, because the exam is so central to the student's education, it seems foolish  to force new professors to write all their own exams from scratch (and threaten them with the word "plagiarism" if they don't).  On the other hand, precisely because it is such hard work, one can certainly see the arguments on the other side.  Scholarship is hard work too -- and we don't want people copying others' work just because new scholars don't always know what they are doing!  Putting formal copyright infringment issues to one side (since I suppose there is that), what do people think?  Would you care if others were "borrowing" your exams, even without attribution?  Would you care if your colleagues were "borrowing" exam questions from others.  I know I wouldn't care about either of these things.  I suppose if I learned a colleague was never writing his/her own exams after several years in teaching but just using some other exam from another school from another year, I'd be somewhat concerned.  But it would take an extreme case to get me going.  In fact, I would encourage new people to use some old questions that have already been tried by people doing it longer, for the students' sakes.

I'm curious if others have different feelings about this.  Of course, many casebook authors support adopters with questions and answers.  But leave that somewhat different scenario out of it.