A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that as law school tuitions have increased, Hispanic and Asians/Pacific Islander  enrollment in law school has increased or stayed at about the same level, while African American enrollment has declined. Contributing to increased tuitions have been  increased emphasis on hands-on clinical experiences and smaller skills-based courses; increased diversity of course offerings, such as international law and environmental law; and increased student support, e.g., academic support, career services, and admissions support.

Amazon just announced a large-format version of their electronic book reader, called the Kindle DX, which you can see in action at engadget. The product doesn't launch until this summer, but it could be in the hands of many university students for a pilot coming to five schools this fall. Library Journal reports that these schools are: Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed College and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.  As of yet, there are no law schools who will try this out.  Because Kindle books are typically locked into a single device, this could mean the disappearance of a used book market.  That said, it means fewer dead trees and possibly more publishing options for content producers.  In law schools, where much of the raw source material is in the public domain, casebooks and case compilations could be done very economically, if not for free.

An interesting feature of the new device is that it supports native PDF documents, instead of forcing people to pay to convert them to a proprietary Kindle format. This means you could get class notes or reading materials in PDF format and read them directly.  It's not clear if this would support image-based formats like scanned law reviews from Hein Online or published reporter cases from Westlaw.  If so, this could be a boon for students willing to pay almost $500 for the device.

In the past, there has been some debate over whether libraries can lend Kindle readers to their users. One problem with having a Kindle in a library is that book purchasing is tied directly to the account on the device.  A library owning one to lend would have to disable purchasing options. Books purchased for the Kindle cannot be transferred to another device.

In advance of the latest Kindle announcement, the New York Times ran a story about large format e-book readers, exploring questions of whether these could save daily newspapers.  Media conglomerate Hearst Corporation is rumored to be launching a wireless e-book reader. They publish everything from Harper's Bazaar to Good Housekeeping to Popular Mechanics.  It will be exciting to see how electronic books develop over time.  They look like a possible life preserver for print media. Perhaps this Fall we'll see how they fare in the education sector.

Update: Additional coverage, including law school topics, is found here:

• Who will get the first e-book into the law school classroom?
• Case Western Reserve University students will use textbooks on Kindle electronic reader

 

Yesterday, in conjunction with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) launched a Legal Education Commons at www.cali.org/lec.  It is designed to be a single searchable & taggable space for teachers of law to share materials and notes they use in teaching.  The initial launch includes access to over 700,000 federal court decisions (from public.resource.org) and 300 original illustrations from its CALI Lessons online tutorials.  All materials uploaded to the Legal Education Commons by faculty and staff at CALI member schools will be done under a Creative Commons Share Alike license, which allows the author to retain the original copyright in the material, but others will be allowed to use it, share it, and make derivative works from it as long as the users make proper attribution and license the derivative under the same (or a compatible) license.  Click here to read the full press release.

The Georgetown Law Center places its share of graduates in law teaching positions, ranking in the top ten of law schools nationwide during the past several years. To help facilitate future careers in academia among current students and alumni, the Library has created a research guide on the subject of law teaching and scholarship.

This guide is designed to help students and alumni who are considering careers in academia, as well as those who are already making the transition to teaching positions. We have included background resources about the legal academy, as well as resources that deal with the hiring process and diversity issues. New and aspiring law professors can also find sources which discuss different approaches to legal scholarship and teaching, along with advice to new professors on teaching methods and scholarly publications. Finally, we have listed major journals that can be consulted for further research on the subject.

Read more about entering a career in legal education in our Law Teaching & Scholarship Guide, written by our new Reference Librarian, Todd Venie.

The New York Times recently featured an article on the new web-based Civics lesson being prepared by the Law Center, in conjunction with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Arizona State University.

The "Our Courts" Project was created to help those seeking to address the evident crisis in civics education. It will be an interactive,  problem-based Civics curriculum designed for the middle school environment. While not completely interactive as yet, it currently contains numerous links offering key definitions, discussion on the branches of government and structure of the courts.

In the article, Justice O'Connor said that most citizens know very little about their government. "Two-thirds of Americans know at least one of the judges on the Fox TV show American Idol, but less than 1 in 10 can name the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, she said."

The Georgetown University Law Library has received a Law Library Publication Award from the American Association of Law Libraries for developing several Web-based legal research tutorials designed to teach first-year law students the basics of legal research. View all tutorials online on our website

Starting in 2007, the Georgetown librarians created the tutorials by using multimedia elements such as interactive demonstrations of online research, scored review questions, and sound to create a self-paced active learning environment to teach legal research skills. Many of the tutorials also require the user's participation in navigating a variety of legal research database simulations.

The tutorials cover topics such as case law research, statutory research, regulatory research, legislative history, secondary resources, and international law research.

The project coordinators were Kumar Percy Jayasuriya, Sara Sampson, and Sara Kelley. The tutorial authors were Amy Burchfield, Sara Kelley, Margaret Krause, Barbara Monroe, Sara Sampson, and Amy Taylor.

An article about the project is featured in the September 2007 issue of the Edward Bennett Williams Friends Newsletter.

Sara Kelley wrote a short article about the project on page 17 of of the Fall 2007 issue of Law Library Lights.

The TaxProf Blog has posted a list of law school commencement speakers for 2008.

Georgetown traditionally announces the speaker a few weeks before the ceremony. See the announcements for 2007 (Nina Totenberg), 2006 (John Roberts) and 2005 (Lee Hamilton).

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a federal lawsuit filed on Monday accuses the University of Texas at Austin of improperly considering an applicant's race when more-effective, race-neutral, ways of achieving diversity were available.

Read more about the case from an article on the Chronicle of Higher Education online (available through a subscription from the Law Library).
Learn more about affirmative action by reviewing any of the books found by searching the GULLiver catalog for the subject of:  Affirmative Action Programs - Law and Legislation - United States.

Professor Michael Hunter Schwartz, of Washburn University School of Law, is looking for the best law professors in America.  He's studying what makes a law professor an excellent teacher for his forthcoming book What the Best Law Teachers Do.  Nominate a professor or learn more about his research. 

Recently, Harvard Law School announced a new initiative which will pay the third year of tuition for future law students who commit to at least five years of public service work upon graduation.  Read the full press release and related links on Harvard's web site.