Spotlight Blog

After a lot of hard work from Elmer, we've unveiled Classcaster version 2.0 powered by Wordpress.

Especially after using it to help create our newest blogs, one as the home for CALI Lawdibles and one as the new home for Richard Leiter's Law Librarian Conversations podcast, we're excited about the possibility of law faculty using Classcaster to create some blogs of their own.

We encourage you to use it as a class blog space or and even to podcast lectures for your law school courses. If you're a law professor, why would you create a Classcaster blog for your course?...

Have a look at this article about A2J Author written by Ron Staudt; Associate Vice President, Law, Business and Technology and Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent.

[A] real success story has emerged based in part on my persistent optimism that technology can improve the delivery of legal services. A2J Author, a modest software tool that allows lawyers to build guided Internet interviews for prospective clients, has been adopted across the United States and in several foreign countries as an interface for public access to legal processes. This Article describes the origin of A2J Author as a collaboration by courts, legal aid agencies, and funding sources. The Article explores the combination of factors that produced this technology, which successfully attacks barriers to access to justice. Finally, the Article speculates on whether A2J Author can begin to transform the delivery of legal aid and government services to low income people.

The article will be published in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. 

Read Prof. Staudt's full A2J article here.

Our CALI Author software makes it pretty easy for you to write your own interactive tutorials or even edit current CALI Lessons for your own (non-commercial) use. We just released a new version of CALI Author: 

Download CALI Author 4.0 here.

Besides the fancy new logo, most notably, we've upgraded the AutoPublish feature.

Upgraded AutoPublish Feature

So once you write an interactive tutorial of your own or customize an existing CALI Lesson, you can, as the AutoPublish name suggests, automatically publish it to the CALI website.

Once you publish the lesson to our website using the AutoPublish feature in CALI Author, you'll get a unique URL. You can pass this URL on to your students so they can run your AutoPublished lesson. You can even track who has used your creation and what they scored within your CALI AutoPublish account (login, righthand menu > CALI AutoPublish).

You can read more about CALI Author here.

Have a look at Prof. Patrick Wiseman's open, online collection of edited Constitutional Law cases. Just a few of the cool features in this collection:

• Ellipses are expandable one by one (), or by selecting an 'expand ellipses' icon (, in the upper left corner), which expands all ellipses in the case.
• All footnotes may be shown by selecting a 'Show footnotes' icon (, also upper left corner).
• The above two features combine to allow restoring the entire case.
• Every paragraph in each case is made a "target", enabling direct linking from the class syllabus or web page to any paragraph.
• In a few cases, editorial footnotes (indicated by lower-case letters, and with text within square brackets) provide commentary or additional information about the case. More such editorial material will be added over time.
• In many cases, links are provided from the top of the first page to concurring and dissenting opinions.
• Supreme Court precedent cited in each case is linked from within the case if available.

Play around with a case and take advantage of some of these features, especially the expandability. You can find Prof. Wiseman's complete project description here.

Prof. Wiseman's hard work is available to anyone who wants to use it under a Creative Commons license. CALI would like to thank Professor Wiseman for sharing his hard work and allowing us to give it a home. And we all should thank him for his willingness to share it with the world.

His sharing is a fantastic example of the spirit of our eLangdell Project. We hope that a few more law professors out there are willing to write casebook materials and make it freely available - and right now we're offering some pretty nice cash incentives for those who write casebook material and give it to us to share.

We at CALI along with the folks at Center for Access to Justice & Technology (CAJT) are very excited about the newest release of A2J Author, version 3.0.

A2J Author helps legal aid attorneys create computer-based, self-guided A2J interviews for use by unrepresented litigants and others in need. The A2J interviews walk users through a step-by-step question and answer process, which, in the end, creates an (often otherwise confusing) legal form.

CALI users who currently use a Comcast email address, as well as a few who use certain law school email addresses, may be experiencing problems receiving emails from CALI. Your spam blocker service has blacklisted CALI, inexplicably, along with a few others who use certain Amazon cloud services (technical details here). We're working hard to fix this mistake.

How to fix it:

This is bad news for those of you with afflicted emails because you cannot receive CALI account verifications and password resets. To avoid the problem, make sure you white list cali.org and the IP 174.129.29.17. If you need help doing this, please talk to your school's IT department.

Test to see if your email is affected:

To test if your email address is one we're having trouble sending to, visit www.cali.org, hit the "Request new password link" and have the system send you a message. It should show up quickly. You don't need to actually reset your password, the link in the message will expire in 24 hours. If it doesn't show up, first check your spam filters, and then let us know.

A very astute reader at Paul Caron's TaxProf blog asked about how we will update the casebook chapters we publish in the eLangdell Ecasebook Stimulus Project.  I have reproduced my reply here for everyone's benefit as I believe this will be a common question.

We'd like to thank AALS and all of its attendees for a great 2010 conference. Some of the themes had a familiar ring to them for CALI. Thanks especially to those of you stopped by the booth and chatted with us about our two newest initiatives eLangdell Stimulus Project and Lawdibles. We've had a lot of interest in both so send your proposals to Deb (dequentel@cali.org) soon.

While you probably won't find an ice sculpture representing humanity's struggle to understand the Rule Against Perpetuities**  at CALI's Party, you will find engaging conversation with some of CALI's wonderful authors, CEB members, board members, friends, and staff.

This year we're also inviting the library directors to join us.  So, please bring your colleagues and join us for drinks and light snack-type hors d'oeuvres.

• Date: Thursday, January 07, 2010
• Time: 5:30 - 8 p.m.
• Location: CALI's Suite at the
  WESTIN NEW ORLEANS CANAL PLACE
  100 Rue Iberville, New Orleans

The Suite number will be available from CALI's booth in the Exhibit Hall at AALS, or by telephoning me at AALS (cell: 773-491-6917). Also, the Suite will be under Deb Quentel's name at the Westin.

We kindly request that you RSVP to Deb, dquentel@cali.org, if you think that you will be joining us.

We look forward to seeing you there.

CALI is getting in the holiday spirit this year by offering law students and professors some new toys.

If you made the nice list, you might find a Lawdible gift-wrapped for you at cali.org/lawdibles.

And we want to spread this holiday joy, so we're offering law professors a little incentive should they decide to give the gift of Lawdibles this season. If you're a professor, find out how you can star in a recording of your own and get a stipend for doing so. Preview the Lawdibles flyer we're handing out at this year's AALS meeting (if you'll be at AALS, please stop by our booth and say hi).

As you can probably tell, even the Scrooge-ish looking eLangdell guy is in the giving mood this year. This can only be because we're giving a stipend for professors who write a casebook chapter and give it to us for the eLangdell Stimulus Project. Here's the eLangdell flyer to find out what, exactly, the eLangdell Stimulus Project is and what, exactly, we are giving to those who contribute to it.

So from the staff at CALI, we'd like to wish you happy holidays!

CALI Reps and Contacts: tired of those CALI authorization code requests this time of year? Find out the best ways you can promote awareness of CALI (and the authorization code) to your school's students in Friday's webinar.

Register for the webinar here.

We will present the benefits of raising student awareness of CALI, the five basic steps all schools should take each year to do so, a few extra tips for those who want to go above and beyond, and we will answer any of your questions. Austin Groothuis, CALI's Marketing Manager, will host this webinar.

Learn to use Moodle, an open-source course management system, this Friday at 2:00.

Register for the webinar on Moodle now.

Professor Vernellia Randall of the Univ. of Dayton School of Law will be our guest presenter.

Think you can name a legal case based on a 140 character hint? CALI will give you a fabulous prize* if you can.

The game is simple: we'll tweet a hint (@CALILawSchool) about a legal case and you guess the case. If you're the first to respond with the right case cite, you win the fabulous prize*.

The only rules are: