Can Law Students Disrupt the Market for High-Priced Textbooks?

Abstract

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to advance legal education through technological innovation and collaboration. With its eLangdell Press project, CALI publishes American law school textbooks in open access, royalty-free form, offering faculty authors compensation equivalent to what most law school textbook authors would earn in royalties from a traditional full-price publisher. I am writing a new sales textbook and “agreements supplement” based on contemporary business practice that I will publish in open access form with CALI’s eLangdell Press. Relatively few other American legal academics publish in open access form, however, suggesting that the market for textbooks may be “locked-in” to a principal-agent conflict between students and faculty members. If American law students organized a website showing the textbook costs of all law faculty members at all law schools, they might be able to use a “naming and shaming” strategy to overcome faculty “lock-in” to high-priced textbooks and increase the adoption of open access textbooks.

Keywords: legal education, law schools, law students, textbooks, casebooks, e-books, open-access, open-source, publishing, market failures, inflation