Open Education Resources (OERs) and other affordable course materials are beginning to gain ground in legal education; the recent growth in hybrid and distance learning and the economic effects of the COVID-19 crisis have also highlighted the need for low-cost, high-quality course content that can readily be accessed and distributed online.
Samuelson Clinic for Authors Alliance on Understanding Open Access: When, Why, & How to Make Your Work Openly Accessible
Prof. Tim Wu (Columbia Law School) on How Professors Help Rip Off Students (NYT Op-Ed)
As in any publishing sector, there are varying qualities and levels of reliability. As you browse the offerings listed here, keep in mind that different platforms have slightly different purposes. This guide lists open-source and low-cost casebooks and similar course content mainly from four law-focused sources, along with law-books from the Open Textbook Library:
CALI is a non-profit consortium of law schools, law libraries, and related organizations that publishes the casebooks listed here, as well as interactive tutorials and podcasts on narrower topics of law.
H2O is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Harvard Law School Library and offers both casebooks and syllabi and reading lists for shorter or other teaching formats, relying in varying degrees on non-open (subscription-based and/or institution-specific courseware-based) access to the full text of content.
LawCarta is a commercial publisher of low-cost digital casebooks created by law professors, and states a mission "to help reduce the cost of education and boost the effectiveness of distributing and delivering learning materials."
Open Textbook Library is a premiere resource for peer-reviewed academic textbooks, and is maintained by the Open Textbook Network (of which the UC Berkeley University Library is a member).
Semaphore Press was founded by two law professors, and publishes a "boutique" list of digital casebooks at a suggested price of $30. Professors who adopt their casebooks are urged to learn about Semaphore's publishing model and to encourage their students to pay the suggested price.
In most cases, clicking on the linked casebook title in this guide should take you directly to the publication; in some cases, you need to register (free) as a user to see a full copy, and/or to access faculty-only content. In this guide, summary information is formatted as follows:
Title Linked to Provider Platform (year of publication) provider logo
[bracketed content notes by librarian] ... excerpt from publisher/author-provided descriptive text
pagination: ___ - (formats available) $__, if any