Info/Law

One of the many interesting presentations I attended at the just-concluded 2009 CALI Conference was a tag-team primer on creating digital statute books and casebooks.  Now, I see that one of the presenters, Professor Steve Bradford of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, has posted on SSRN the paper he discussed at CALI.  Here’s the pithy abstract:

Law students spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on statute books or statutory supplements for their courses. These statutory supplements, notorious for their weight and bulkiness, are compilations of subject-specific statutes and regulations, most of which are publicly available at no charge. This article discusses the advantages of digital statute books, details how the authors created a digital statute book that was used in two securities regulation courses, and evaluates the result of that experiment.

In brief, Professor Bradford created a downloadable PDF copy of the statutes and regulations needed for his Securities Regulation class.  It’s a massive document, over 2,400 pages, enough to give any law student severe spine problems if they printed it out and carried around in their backpack.  But of course, the point of the statute book being digital is that you don’t have to do that.  Furthermore, Bradford made it possible to highlight and annotate the document in Acrobat Reader.  If you’re interested in seeing it, you can download the whole thing from Bradford’s class page.

Filed under: Books, Digital Media, Education & Copyright, Internet & Society, Law School, Open Access