Author: elmer

BoleyBlogs! » Open Access Legal Scholarship at Lewis & Clark- Paul L. Boley Law Library – This follows along after last year’s Open Access Law program.  One would hope that this may catch on, But I’m not sure the critical mass is there.  Law faculty are not so concerned about open acces to their scholarship, it seems to me.  Perhpas if there was an actual authoring platform that encouraged open Access to the materials being created, this would pick up steam.

technorati tags: Open_Access_Law, elLandell

Good question.  I found this article which does a good job
of describing Christopher Columbus Langdell’s contribution to legal education in America.  I
thought this quote was particularly interesting:

"Langdell’s innovations initially met with enormous resistance. Many
students were outraged. During the first three years of his
administration, as word spread of Harvard’s new approach to legal
education, enrollment at the school dropped from 165 to 117 students,
leading Boston University to start a law school of its own. Alumni were
in open revolt."

It’s hard to imagine today someone changing the way law is taught to
such an extent that the school loses a third of its students, but they
stick with it until it becomes the standard.  In a way, I think, CALI is
heralding such a sea change, but instead of it being focused on a single
school, we spread the risk out across the entire consortium. Lessons,
Classcaster, and, soon, eLangdell, taken together represent a change
every bit as challenging and revolutionary as the introduction of the
case method except that the changes introduced by CALI will not take 40
years to become the standard.
 

technorati tags: CALI_Lessons, Classcaster, Christopher_Columbus_Langdell