David I.C. Thomson, Law School 2.0

Denver Law School Professor David I.C. Thomson is not your typical law school professor. Why? Because he actually practiced as a lawyer for over 20 years before becoming a prof. Pretty obivious concept-professors are teaching students to be lawyers so one would think that they are good lawyers themselves. Unfortunately, that is not where legal education is today. Look at any law review article today. Most are long and full of useless legal theory. Courts do not cite them because there is nothing practical about them.
Professor Thomson new book, Law 2.0 (Lexis Nexis 2009) is at the polar opposite of traditional law school thinking. The book itself utilizes the web to provide readers with a taste of what is inside and additional reference material. The book starts out by outlining who a typical law student is and how most of them are tech savy. The point of the book is to utilize the web as a teaching tool. Though the title of the book indirectly refers to Web. 2.0, which it explains is a phrase used to refer to interactive web pages such as blogs and wiki's, the focus of the book is clearly on the internet. It gives wonderful examples how an online text book could include video links and links to court documents. The book talks about podcasts of law school lectures and the new for online law reviews. About 1/2 the book, which spans 158 pages also summarizes the major criticisms with law schools today.
While this book is interesting and certainly worth a read, I am not sure who the book's audience is. It appears to be directed to the legal academy. They certainly need to read it. It is available from Amazon.com here.

Mitchell H. Rubinstein