Why I Decided to Construct a Free Online Casebook Available to Anyone for Civ Pro Using the H20 Platform

One of the nice things about tenure is that it frees you up to to do things you know are good for the world but may not be adequately valued in the tenure process. This summer I will embark on one such project, building a free online casebook for Civ Pro. I will be using the Harvard Berkman Center H20 "hack the casebook" platform. This great platform allows you to create "playlists" of cases and other materials that can be "remixed" by others, added to, etc. The initial goal of the project is to create a completely free H20 platform casebook for each of the firsy year classes, and I have stepped up to do Civ Pro.

Let me tell you a little bit about why I chose to do this because it may encourage others to join this great project or ones like it.

First, like others, I am shocked at how expensive textbooks have become for doctrinal 1L course. I realized that together my casebook and supplement (including the FRCP, major statutesm, etc) would cost my students $243 a piece and thus providing them with free materials would save at least $19,000 among my own students for next year. When multiplied over several years, as well as the possibility that other faculty would adopt this textbook and save their students money, this just seemed like a value creating proposition.In a time when students across the U.S. are struggling with the high price of legal education, I felt I should do what I could here.

Second, most of the materials I teach in my Civ Pro class are major Supreme Court cases (with a few Circuit and state court cases) that could be easily found and edited in public domain format, which the H20 platform makes easy. Just because of the way I teach my own course and the textbook I was using, I was already not assigning many of the notes that followed the cases and I was supplementing the book with additional materials (some written up by myself) so that the value the casebook was offering to my course that could not be found in the public domain was lessened. To be sure, I will still have to replace introductory sections of various parts of the book with my own write-ups as well as do editing of all the versions of the cases I will still use -- no small amount of effort -- but I might have felt differently about undertaking this if my casebook was doing more original work for me in the way I taught my course.

Third (and here I am purposefully not being specific and naming the casebook in question because, for all I know, all Casebooks in the field are similar in this regard): my casebook is more than 1200 pages long. I estimate that I use only about 300-450 of those pages in a 4 credit introductory course. It does have a compact addition for shorter courses, but unfortunately what it chooses to keep versus discard is not a good fit for what I use from the book. Before I decided to do the H20 version myself, I called the publisher of my casebook to see if I could "buy by the page" for the pages I actually use, a practice that some textbooks allow you to do. I was told I could not. Given that they have gone to the trouble of creating a "condensed" version I do not blame the authors/publishers, but this was the last straw for me in deciding to go it on my own.

This summer, along with my RAs, will be spent doing a beta version of the free H20 Casebook for Civ Pro that I will test out with my incoming 1Ls in the fall. I am incredibly grateful to Harvard Law School for allowing me to use my time (and RA time) for this project whose value will hopefully be externalized. I am particularly grateful to my dean, Martha Minow, since she is herself the co-author of a Civ Pro textbook (not the one I had been using), so she is basically authorizing the law school to fund a project that may cut into her own sales. She's just that kind of classy person! The beta version will be kept internal to my students for the fall, but if all goes well I hope to share it with the world in 2014 and perhaps others will want to adopt it.

- I. Glenn Cohen