Professors Michelle Oberman, David Ball, and Michael Flynn, along with 11 of their students (Cydney Chilimidos, Miriam Contreras, Jenai Howard, Christina Iriart, Angela Madrigal, Leah Mesfin, Zachary Nemirovsky, Nicholas Newman, Nathanial Perez, Michael Pons, and PhilipYin) have published an open-licensed Crim Law Casebook available on Harvard Law School’s Open Casebook / H2O at opencasebook.org/casebooks/981-balloberman-crim-law-casebook-beta-version-undergoing-revision-until-august-15-2020/. In addition, Professors Oberman and Ball have published a companion open-licensed casebook titled Current Challenges in Criminal Law also available on H2O at opencasebook.org/casebooks/981-balloberman-crim-law-casebook-beta-version-undergoing-revision-until-august-15-2020/. This second text features audio and video material keyed to topics in the first.
This project grew out of the authors’ desire to transform legal education “to make learning and teaching more inclusive, less alienating, and less expensive.” The authors sought to create teaching materials for Criminal Law that were more thoughtful about issues of race, sex, and sexual orientation. Professors Oberman, Ball, and Flynn worked with their students to identify problem areas in traditional teaching materials, to explore how knowledge is produced and culture is transmitted, and to create teaching materials “designed to minimize the harms created by legal education’s historical tendency to ignore, if not enshrine, our collective biases.” The authors plan to follow up with a workshop in Spring 2021 to enable collaboration among professors and students who want to rethink the curriculum in a variety of subject areas.