Hypertext for Law Students: A Preliminary Report on Computer Law on Disk, 2.0

• Autore: Ronald W. Staudt/Rosemary Shiels
• Pagine: 307-316

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@1. Introduction

In the United States, the core of the law school curriculum in American law schools teaches substantive law in particular subject areas aad, simultaneously, attempts to help students to acquire intellectual skills that are relevant for their coming professional lives. The predominant law classroom instruction method in the United States is a question and answer exchange between professor and students examining court opinions and analyzing the relationships of these cases to one another and to the legal system in 4 general. Typically, professors rely on printed casebooks: collections of court opinions edited and sequenced by professors interspersed with comments, questions and cross-references.

Students' study patterns vary from one to another and change as students progress through the three years of law school. There are some dominant patterns that we have observed in the techniques that students use to prepare for classes and for their final examinations, In the first year, most students write reading notes in advance of class, often in the form of case briefs. Class often focuses on close case analysis, As they read, many students color or highlight the texts in their books for emphasis or easy location if called upon to recite in class. In later years, separate written notes before class often give way to short marginalia in the casebook marking the decision points, questions, inconsistencies, or linking passages to prior readings. Most students prepare for the examinations given at the end of each course by reviewing their notes, reading parts of the text and published summaries of the law, and seeking additional perspectives from other students. Frequently, students will distil these various sources into their own written course outlines.

Since 1983, we have experimented at Chicago-Kent College of Law with the use of computers in law school. While we have supported the activities of the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (cali) and others to use computers as instructional aids, our primary interest has beenPage 308 the potential of personal computers to help students synthesize legal materials, see connections between cases and concepts, and understand legal analysis. We sought productivity and synthesis tools tc equip students with powerful electronic learning systems to study for class and examinations. For example, in 1984 we taught students to use outlining software to organize their reading notes and to see the connections among various legal concepts. By describing cases and categorizing them in richly labeled outlines as they studied for class, we suggested that students could create a concentrated synthesis of the substantive law based on their own reading notes and class notes. New cases and notes should force students to revise their categories and reorder the relationships among prior cases. We argued that this outlining process mirrors the common law legal system that students were studying¹.

In the 1980's, we used Framework, a strong outlining tool that provided dynamic expansion, collapse and reordering of titles with associated text paragraphs. Framework contained an integrated word processor. The students could use this tool to write case briefs for class preparation and build detailed, comprehensive outlines for exam preparation by incorporating the briefs and the class notes within the same software environment. As law firms and professors adopted WordPerfect as their standard word processor, students resisted the Framework approach. Outlining tools like Framework and Grandview were separate a from the dominant word processor that was the students' thight capture tool. Most students hanfled outlining or post-course synthesis as a word processing job using the conceptually weaker outlining tools in WordPerfect.

By 1990, the development of microcomputer hypertext tools offered new ways to represent and link information². Because hypertext is so open-ended and flexible, it may be a better computer model of legal concepts than hierarchical outlines³. Hypertext offered new tools to build electronic casebooks with linking features that were significantly more versatile than print casebooks.

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Beginning in 1992, we experimented with building electronic course kits to substitute for printed casebooks. We intended students to use the hypertext course kit to read cases, prepare pre-class notes, participate in class, and synthesize the courses thus supporting the full range of law student tasks in one set of computer tools. Professor Staudt and his research assistant, David Kiefer, designed an electronic casebook for use by students in the Computer Law class in the Fall, 1992, using a DOS-based hypertext environment called ´HyperPADª. The description of that course kit and its use by students has been reported earlier⁴. In 1993, we transported the Computer Law electronic book to Folio VIEWS 3.0⁵.

The remainder of this paper describes the setting within which we built and tested our views 3.0 electronic course kit, Computer Law on Disk 2.0. "We also identify five key objectives we seek to achieve and comment on the suitability of views 3.0 as a platform for electronic course kits that meet these objectives.

@@1.1 Computer Law Course

In the Fall, 1992 and 1993, Professor Staudt distributed the entire book for Ms Computer Law course to...