Guest Post: A New Open-Source Casebook
Introducing the Contracts Open-Source Casebook Project
Guy A. Rub & Ethan J. Leib
We’re excited to release a project we’ve been working on (with our co-authors: Matthew Bodie, Pamela Bookman, Tal Kastner, and Jake Linford) for some time: The Open-Source Contract Law Casebook. If you teach contracts and are looking for more affordable materials for your students or are simply seeking a more customizable way to structure the course, we hope you’ll take a close look.
We know there are already many contract law casebooks out there, and many of them are excellent. So why launch this project? Not because we had nothing better to do. But two core motivations made us feel this was worth our time.
First, the rising costs of legal education. We became increasingly uncomfortable asking our students to spend hundreds of dollars on casebooks, especially when most of the core content (judicial opinions) is in the public domain. Moreover, we were often asking students to pay for material there was no way we could cover as our teaching credits got trimmed in curricular reforms. On top of the price, the commercial options often come with strings attached, including limitations on access, usage, and formatting.
Second, like many professors, we’ve developed our own distinct ways of teaching contract law. Over time, we found ourselves assigning commercial casebooks with lengthy editorial notes, often skipping chapters, rearranging content, and supplementing them heavily with our own materials. The traditional casebook model made it hard to align the text with our teaching goals, priorities, and style. It also got messy for the students as materials from many different places had to be collated and read out of order.
The open-source casebook aims to address these issues. It’s free, customizable, modular, and flexible. It is thus designed to meet the evolving needs of our diverse community of contract law professors and students. Inspired by a similar initiative in property law, we believe legal education, especially in core courses like contract law, can be rigorous without being expensive, and collaborative without being one-size-fits-all.
That’s how this project began: we wanted a casebook that could be tailored to different teaching priorities, and we wanted to share it freely so others could do the same. On our website, we outline the ways you can use the open-source casebook. Here are a few highlight features of this project:
Modularity: The casebook is composed of discrete units that can, with minor exceptions, be covered in any order (or skipped entirely). You can tailor the text to fit your syllabus and preferences. Want to start with remedies (or consideration or offer and acceptance or something else)? Emphasize the UCC or the common law? Skip excuses? Go ahead. The project is built for it.
: Use the casebook as-is or remix it. Add your own notes, swap in cases, create new hypotheticals, or emphasize the themes that matter most to you. Because it’s published under a Creative Commons license, you can do all of this (legally and freely).
Freedom from the external constraints: This isn’t just about saving money for students or having more pedagogical control. It’s also about avoiding a host of irritating, time-consuming, and, at times, harmful limitations. There are no convoluted platforms, no logins (other than for the teacher’s manuals and proposed slides, which we make available behind a password-protected part of the website), no DRMs, no proprietary formats. Just simple PDF and Word files. Consider, for example, a recent challenge: many professors now
restrict internet access during exams due to generative-AI concerns, but then find that their students can’t access their digital casebooks. While this problem might (or might not) be solvable, it, and similar ones, are completely irrelevant when the casebook is free and available to download in unrestricted, straightforward formats.
If any of this sounds useful, we encourage you to take a deeper dive. On our site, you can browse individual units or explore full casebook builds. You can adopt them as-is or adapt them however you like. If you are anxious about whether the book treats some of your favorite cases, you can look at the Table of Principal Cases on the website to make sure we have you covered. We also hope to foster a growing community of teachers who share resources. If you’ve developed your own materials, we’d love for you to contribute (with credit, of course). This project has given us not just new tools, but also new ideas and connections, and we’d love to build on that momentum with your involvement.
If you’re intrigued, check it out: https://contractscasebook.org/.