For many years, law students have written and collected course notes for their subjects. These notes vary wildly in quality. Some rival the best academic study guides and text books, others are either unfortunately outdated or wrong. The reaction by academics has historically been to attempt to suppress or ignore these notes; students are warned not to rely on unofficial or borrowed notes in a manner designed to encourage students to attend classes and take their own notes. Typically, these warnings fail. Student notes are ever popular, even as the prices of the officially-sanctioned cases and materials textbooks continue to rise to unsustainable levels.

The collaborative possibilities of wikis and the drastically lower distribution costs present an opportunity to change the way textbooks are generated and disseminated. This wiki opens up this process, and provides notes on cases and materials, collaboratively written by academics and students.

This model provides some very interesting features:

1. Seeded by material from academics who research and teach in the relevant disciplines.
2. Provides a central resource for students to collaborate on and share the burden of writing notes.
3. In exchange for student labour, edits to the wiki are regularly reviewed by experts for accuracy.
4. Authoritative versions are edited and collated for publication on a cost-recovery basis only.

In addition to a more general repository of notes on cases and other materials, this wiki serves as the basis for the creation and collaborative editing of authoritative, accurate, and accessible open textbooks. By creating a more efficient means to write textbooks, we aim to be able to provide high quality books that can be shared on open terms and distributed in hardcopy form at very low prices.

For more information, contact Nic Suzor <nic at suzor dot net>.