Legal Commentary

As I noted in my last post, I?ve been thinking about ways to incorporate more outside-of-the-casebook material in my classes -- like elaborate hypotheticals that aren't in the book.

One question I?ve had in doing this is whether law professors can and should engage in more production and sharing of free educational resources ? much in the same way that developers of free software, as Yochai Benkler points in Coase?s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm (112 Yale L.J. 369 (2002)), develop and distribute free software without being ordered or paid to do so. More specifically, should law professors view it as part of their job and/or professional role to develop free educational materials to be made available not only in their own classes (or institutions), but in Web-based libraries of hypotheticals, PowerPoint (or KeyNote) slides, MindManager diagrams, or legal analyses that are made available to law professors (and, in some cases, law students) everywhere?

Of course, to some extent this is already happening. Academics, as Benkler points out in that article, already contribute articles to a common body of scholarship that is available to all of their peers. We also engage in some sharing of teaching materials, in blogs like this one and, with a quick search on Google or iTunes U, I can find numerous syllabi, podcasts, and other materials that give me a good sense of how some of my colleagues teach the same subjects I teach. CALI collects numerous lessons on its Web site (and I can easily add them to my courses with the TWEN course management system).

But I can?t help wondering if it would benefit law students and professors if this sharing of educational materials happened a lot more ? and if law professors, apart from being rewarded professionally for their scholarly productivity and in-class effectiveness, were also rewarded professionally for making creative contributions to such a stock of free teaching materials ? and for making such materials available on a Web site (or other electronic gathering ground) where everybody knows such materials can be found, and has some way to easily search, browse, and evaluate them. Such a one-stop shopping (or sharing) station for free law teaching materials would, I suspect, make it more feasible for professors to deviate from the casebook, and draw on written problems and multimedia tools outside of the stock of materials that a casebook typically provides. I suppose its possible something like this is already around (or emerging) and that I've simply missed it. If that's the case, please let me know where to find it.