Contracts LibGuides

This year, my colleauges at the Valparaiso University Law School and I, with the help of our librarian, Jeese Bowman (pictured), are teaching with the aid of this LibGuide.  The LibGuide contains all of the cases that we will use in our courses, plus links to Restatement,  UCC and CISG sections, as well as tabs through which students can find links to excercises, past exams and model answers, study guides, blog posts and other information that might prove useful to our students.

The move to the LibGuide was motivated by a number of considerations.  First, we have all used different casebooks and find a great deal to praise and admire in all of them.  However, no single casebook can be perfect for each contracts professor's individual needs.  I have a roster of cases that I think work best for the material I want to convey to my students.  No single casebook includes all of the cases I want to use, and the casebook authors sometimes edit their cases slightly differently than how I would edit them.  My colleagues and I edited the cases posted on the LibGuide to suit our teaching needs, and if we differ, we can always put up multiple versions.  

Second, even if I could find the perfect casebook that had every single case I want to teach and all the relevant ancillary materials, I still could not justify the expense to my students.  Casebook prices are simply too high, since we can deliver the same materials through the LibGuides.  I should note that, because I ban laptops and other technology from my classroom, I do require that the students buy xeroxed copies of the edited cases.  That will run them $10 a piece for the first seven-week minimester.

Yup! That's not a typo!  We are teaching contracts in two, two-credit, seven-week "minimesters," a topic about which I will have a lot to say in future posts.  

The LibGuide is still a work in progress.  Each week, I send Jesse more materials to add to the LibGuide.  This is another advantage of the LibGuide over print course materials.  It is easily expanded; easily revised; easily updated.  

The final advantage of the LibGuide is (dare I say it?) . . . LibGuides are fun.  Ask any librarian!  And believe you me, librarians know how to have fun.  They are fun for the same reason that this blog is fun.  You can follow links that interest you, and they often take you to unexpected and illuminating places.  We hope that our LibGuide will grow and prosper and that it will provide a portal through which our students can wander cautiously, tentatively until [whoosh!] they fall down a rabbit hole and emerge in the Wonderland of contract law.

[JT]