The ContractsProfs Blog Vlog, Contracts Stuff: Discussions with Casebook Authors

Here is a link to our third Video Blog, which is a conversation with recent casebook authors.

They are:

Jonathan Lipson and Rachel Rebouché, co-authors of the Contracts Law in Action, 5th Edition, an approach pioneered by Stewart Macauley and William Whitford and now also co-edited with Wendy Netter Epstein.

Christina Kunz, co-author of Contracts: A Contemporary Approach, which I believe is now out in a 4th Edition, and Learning Sales Law, in its 2nd edition, both co-authored with Carol Chomsky, Jennifer Martin, and Elizabeth Schiltz.

Dan Barnhizer and Wayne Barnes, co-authors of Sales: A Contemporary Approach (so new I don’t even have an image).

It’s a fascinating conversation about what motivated these scholars to undertake the arduous task of editing a casebook. The four books under consideration offer a great range of methodological approaches. The Contracts: Law in Action book is a legendary work known in the guild as “The Wisconsin Materials,” and it is informed by a historical and sociological approach. While that approach is hardly impractical, wedding as it does theory and practice, Dan and Wayne’s see their book as a direct translation of their teaching method into print. The aim is not to hide the ball but to just present students with the relevant code sections, explain them, and then provide examples and problems that help the students solidify their understanding of the code. The Kunz, Chomsky, Martin, and Schiltz books are also extremely practical but they are supplemented with a legal analysis/legal reasoning component that Christina imported based on her background in teaching legal writing.

Our first Vlog was on the impact of AI on teaching.

Our second was about blogging about scholarship.