It may be too late in the game for law professors to choose a new casebook for this Fall’s courses, but that has not stopped our colleagues from distributing recently what I can only call a deluge of announcements of new editions of old texts, and in some instances, new texts altogether.
In almost every instance, these are announcements of materials that are either free to students or are offered on a low/modest cost basis. The Internet law and intellectual property law communities have long been out in front of this “movement” to steer away teachers and students away from legacy and proprietary publishers (I myself committed several years ago to teaching all of my courses entirely from materials that are free and open), but (i) a large number of legal fields now feature multiple good, high quality options in this space, and (ii) CALI, Semaphore Press, and the H2O team at Harvard have been institutional players for a long while.
James Grimmelmann (Cornell Law) maintains this incredibly valuable resource page of free and low-cost casebooks for law professors and their students.
