Law School Innovation

A pay-what-you-want casebook

From Profs. Lydia Loren and Joe Miller (both of Lewis & Clark Law School), a pay-what-you-feel casebook on intellectual property. According to Prof. Loren:

Joe Miller and I have written a new IP Survey book and we are looking for some “beta testers” to try it out next semester. The book is entirely in digital form. If a student would like a hard copy they are free to print out the book or any part of it. Also, there is a full digital statutory supplement that comes with the book – at no extra charge to the students. You can view a table of contents online.

We are offering this book through a new publishing company that we started, called Semaphore Press, using a “radiohead” distribution model: students are given a suggested price of $30 for the book, but can elect to pay something different (more or less). They can even not pay anything by clicking on the “Freeride” button. You can read more about the publishing company and its philosophy at http://www.semaphorepress.com. As a professor interested in reviewing the book, you can always click on the “freeride” button at the bottom of the payment page to take a look at the entire book (or any part).

Prof. Miller is using this book this fall at the University of Georgia and I’m using it at Lewis& Clark (in two separate sections). We have found that students like the flexibility that the digital format offers. One student even prepared audio files of the different chapters so that he could listen to the book while commuting. And, we also found that students appreciate the reasonable pricing of the book, with a majority of them opting to pay the suggested price.

Let us know if you are interested in adopting this book. While neither you nor your school’s bookstore needs to “order” anything from us, we would like to know who is adopting the book so we can continue to evaluate the book, the distribution model, and in general seek feedback from the beta testers! We also have a survey that we would appreciate having students complete at the end of the term. We are also happy to share our power point files and syllabi.

Here, again, is the link to Intellectual Property Law: Cases & Materials. Try it out -- you'll see that the site is designed so that users are strongly channeled through the "pay something" page. I wonder if the authors' pay rate will remain high as the relationship between them and the students attenuates (e.g. if profs at other schools assign this book)? I guess we'll find out soon.

Not to be outdone, Prof. Thomas Field of Franklin Pierce School of Law mentions that he offers a free textbook for download via SSRN: Fundamentals of Intellectual Property: Cases & Materials. The digital version is free; a microprint costs around $16-17 right now.

- Gene Koo

What will be (and should be) the future of traditional law school grading?

At his law school blog, Brian Leiter has this notable post, titled "Will Other Schools Follow the Yale/Harvard/Stanford Lead of Effectively Eliminating Grades?".  Here is how it starts:

There are rumors aplenty that Columbia and NYU may move to something like the Yale system of essentially two grades -- Honors/Pass -- now that Harvard and Stanford are going that route (though perhaps these two will actually utilize Low Pass and Fail, unlike Yale).  NYU, given its size, can probably least afford to eliminate sorting mechanisms, especially since it appears Columbia grads are still slightly preferred by the very top NYC firms.  For those who have asked, I think there is essentially no chance Chicago will go this route, or anything like this route.

Among interesting aspects of this post is the notion that the virtues and vices of a two-grade system may depend significantly on the size of a law school (even though Harvard and Stanford represent opposite extremes as to law school size).  Of course, it seems obvious that the virtues and vices of a two-grade system may also depend significantly on the national reputation of a law school, though I could readily imagine good (and bad) arguments for schools not consistently ranked in the Top 10 considering a move to an Honors/Pass grading system.

Some related LSI posts:

• Does (law school) size matter?
• Is there an ideal grading system for law schools?

Innovation and a big move

Last week I traveled to rural Buie's Creek, North Carolina to give the Professionalism Lecture at Campbell Law School.  Campbell is an interesting place, but the real intrigue (and innovation) will occur next year.

Put simply, Campbell is picking up and moving, pretty much for pedagogical purposes.  It will leave the rest of the university in Buie's Creek behind and move into a beautiful new building in the middle of Raleigh, just a block or two from the state capitol, the offices of major law firms, and clinical opportunities.  Unlike other moves (for example, the move of Detroit College of Law to Lansing to become part of Michigan State), this relocation has nothing to do with an acquisition-- Campbell will remain a part of the larger university.  Rather, the move is intended to provide a better educational experience and a location more attractive to students. 

As part of the move, Campbell has designed into their building a home for the Raleigh division of North Carolina's business court.  While many schools (including Baylor) will host court hearings on occasion, it is rare to have a permanent court within a law school, though the advantages are obvious.

-- Mark Osler

The University of Louisville's law faculty SSRN aggregator page

»  Reprinted from The Cardinal Lawyer and MoneyLaw  «

The University of Louisville is justifiably proud of its law faculty and of the high-impact academic work generated by this community of scholars.  In earlier posts (like this and this and this), The Cardinal Lawyer has made much of SSRN.Despite its small size, and despite having taken active part in SSRN for less than two years, the University of Louisville ranks 41st among American law schools in recent SSRN downloads and 57th in all-time downloads as of October 12, 2008.

Many law professors and some law schools make an effort to promote papers available for download from SSRN.  The University of Louisville has taken aggressive measures to promote its entire faculty's SSRN portfolio.  Louisville publishes an SSRN aggregator page that collects every faculty member's contributions to the SSRN database as they are made.  A summary of each article, complete with a link to that article's own SSRN page, appears on the aggregator page.  And best of all, in harmony with Law 2.0 and the thoroughly interconnected environment in which contemporary legal education operates, the University of Louisville's faculty SSRN aggregator page has its own RSS feed .

ouisville's own SSRN aggregator page complements but does not replace the University of Louisville School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series on SSRN.  This series has its own subscription mechanism.  Like other subscribers, I receive periodic updates by e-mail and can click through to my colleagues' most recent work.

One byproduct of Louisville's faculty-wide SSRN aggregator is an individual SSRN aggregator page for each member of the faculty.  Consider, for example, the SSRN treasure troves associated with my colleague, Judith D. Fischer. Judy's University of Louisville-generated SSRN aggregator page and regular SSRN page testify to a prolific and creative mind.  For my own part, I am considering the possibility of linking to my own UofL-generated SSRN aggregator page wherever I have already seen fit to promote my regular SSRN page.  Through its facility with scripts and feeds, Louisville's information technology staff has given the entire faculty many weapons for heightening awareness, within the academy and among members of the public at large, of the powerful legal scholarship being generated at the University of Louisville.

— Jim Chen

Great (though incomplete) look at HLS, innovations, and the future of elite law schools

The Boston Globe yesterday had this terrific article discussing the recent past, present and future of Harvard Law School.  The article has lots of interesting passages for would-be law school innovators:

For the first time in years, Cambridge is home to some of the most important new voices in public law.  And Harvard's rise is shaking up other top schools, creating a hiring war as they scramble to recruit new scholars. "It has unsettled things at the top of the legal academy," said Leiter. "Harvard is this giant vacuum with endless amounts of money, and it keeps sucking up more."

Just as striking, though, at a place full of professional arguers and their students, is the sense of frictionlessness and good feeling that now pervades the campus. This, as much as anything, marks a stark change for a school whose august name was not always buttressed by the realities along Mass. Ave....

[Dean Elana] Kagan set to work early, making small but visible changes to improve the everyday lives of students. She started providing free coffee in classroom buildings, and free tampons in the women's bathrooms. On a lawn outside the student center, she added a beach volleyball court that doubled, during the long Cambridge winter, as a skating rink....

For her part, Kagan describes that early flurry of face lifts and new perks as an idea borrowed from her former boss, Bill Clinton: The faith that small, symbolic policies could help solve big problems.  "When I got here I looked around for little things I could do: things that don't cost much money, don't take much time, that you don't have to have a faculty meeting to do," she said in an interview in her office. "As it turns out," she said with a slight laugh, "you can buy more student happiness per dollar by giving people free coffee than anything else I've discovered."

On the broadest level, Kagan's governing philosophy seems to be one of persistent experimentation, of making the school more open to innovation and change.  "Before, every possible change had to be weighed against hundreds of years of illustrious history. Now changes are weighed by asking whether it might make something better," said Elizabeth Warren, a bankruptcy law professor who chairs the school's admissions committee.

There is a lot more in this great piece that also makes it a must-read for anyone who follows the dynamics of elite law schools and the role of faculty hiring (though I may be biased because the article says so many nice things about my alma mater).

I also found interesting what the article did not discuss: modern political dynamics.  If polls are to be believed, the country is about to elect a president who graduated from Harvard Law School.  (Indeed, I believe that, if Senator Obama wins, he will be the first HLS graduate elected to be President.)  A number of Senator Obama's mentors are HLS Professors, including prominent figures including Professors Ogletree, Sunstein and Tribe.  In addition, Dean Kagan has been high on many Supreme Court short lists for those considering what kinds of judges a President Obama might appoint.  (Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School has also appeared on a lot of these lists.)

There is good reason to believe a President Obama would look to the legal academy for help with his administration and for potential judicial nominees.  If so, HLS would likely be the law school he looks to first -- perhaps along with Chicago, where Senator Obama taught for a number of years.  Though I doubt we should expect a huge migration to DC from HLS and other elite law schools (as occured in some prior generations), I do expect the future of a number of elite law schools to be greatly impacted by what happens on November 4 this year.

Posted by DAB

"The Laptop-Free Zone"

The title of this post is the title of this new article on SSRN.  The article appears to be a thoughtful examination of the laptops-in-the-classroom debate that has engaged so many law professors.  Here is the abstract:

This new article, "The Laptop-Free Zone," addresses the hotly debated issue of laptops in law school classroom; those debates are ongoing on countless blogs, on NPR, in national newspapers, and across law school campuses. This article reports and analyzes the data collected through an IRB-approved survey of almost 450 law school students at three different law schools regarding the students' views of laptops and reported distractions caused by laptops. To provide context, the article also addresses the current arguments against laptops, negating those points as being outweighed by the proper and beneficial use of laptops. Additionally, the article provides information to be considered in teaching adults and to different learning styles, namely, global and analytic learners, and how those concerns are matters to consider in the laptop debate.

According to the survey results, students who do not use a laptop are overwhelmingly more likely to be distracted by others' laptops than students who are using their own laptops. In other words, yes, laptops cause distractions, but that primarily affects students who are not using a laptop. Accordingly, based on the learning style information and my survey results, I suggest that laptops not be banned from law school classrooms. Instead, I argue that professors must do their best to teach to all students - to those who feel they learn best by using a laptop as an aid and to those who complain of the distractions caused. I do this by implementing a laptop-free zone, restricting the first or first few rows in my classrooms to no laptops. This creates an area where students who are distracted by neighboring screens and nearby typing are free (as possible without an all-out ban) from those distractions. Further, doing so still respects those students who have learned to use a laptop as an educational tool.

As a surprise to me, the survey also showed that many students make the decision to give up their laptop after experiencing attending a class without one, noting they would not have been willing to go through such an experience by their own decision. However, once they experience not using a laptop in the law school classroom environment, they often change their method of taking notes and report improved learning and classroom experiences. Accordingly, I also suggest that instead of banning laptops, we provide beginning students with only a week or two of a laptop ban at some time during the first semester of school. This compromise will serve the interest of the most students most effectively, respecting them as adults while providing supportive guidance to their own decisions about their learning environment.

Some recent related posts:

• Power to the students? The case of laptops in the classroom
• Experimenting with a one-child one-laptop policy
• What if a dean prohibited some faculty use of technology...?
• Shouldn't we just grade class participation rather than ban laptops?

Does U.S. News lock us into using the LSAT for Admissions?

Brian Leiter recently (and properly) critiqued a new admissions program at Michigan Law as an attempt to game the U.S. News rankings.  In short, the new program will admit students who are Michigan undergrads provided they DON'T take the LSAT.  The purpose of this requirement, it seems, is that it allows Michigan Law to take students on the margin without hurting their LSAT-based U.S. News rank.

It is hard to figure out how the requirement not to take the LSAT is anything other than a dodge around taking a hit in the rankings.  This incident, though, also raises an intriguing question.  Some colleges are now de-emphasizing or phasing out the SAT as an admission criteria.  Would law schools be dissuaded from doing the same (relative to the LSAT) because it would smack them in the rankings?

-- Mark Osler