Chris Bavitz is the WilmerHale Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is also Managing Director of HLS’s Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. And, he is a Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Klein Center. Chris teaches the Counseling and Legal Strategy in the Digital Age and Music & Digital Media seminars, and he concentrates his practice activities on intellectual property and media law (particularly in the areas of music, entertainment, and technology). We recently talked about how he approaches the evolution of his course material after a decade of teaching with H2O.

What courses are you currently teaching or preparing to teach?

I work with the team at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School and co-teach the Cyberlaw Clinic Seminar with my colleague, Jess Fjeld. I also teach a couple of other non-clinical courses including one that I’ve taught with H2O for over a decade — a class called Music and Digital Media.

When did you first start using H2O?

The first law school course I ever taught completely on my own was the Music and Digital Media course, and I used H2O for it from the very beginning. The H2O platform was very much in its infancy at the time, but it quickly became apparent that it was going to fulfill a really specific need in terms of annotating and excerpting cases. It would also be a good place to gather readings and links to readings that did not need to be excerpted.

The bread and butter of law school teaching materials are court opinions. Typically, cases include a lot of material beyond what we want to assign a law student to read in a given week. H2O had developed an elegant solution to this problem — I could select a chunk of text and press a button to hide it from view while keeping it available to students to access if they wanted to see it. And, I remember thinking, “why did we not have this before?” It felt like a no-brainer that for cases, statutes, and other primary source legal materials, H2O was the best possible solution.

Brian Quinn is a professor at Boston College Law School where he teaches Corporations, Corporate Counsel Seminar, Mergers & Acquisitions, as well as Deals: The Economic Structure of Transactions. Professor Quinn’s research focuses on corporate law, mergers & acquisitions, the structuring of transactions, transactional law, and private ordering. We recently spoke about his longtime use of H2O to teach Corporations, and the casebook he is currently developing to teach Venture Capital.

When did you first start using H2O, and what prompted you to transition your course material into H2O?

I first started using H2O in the fall of 2013, so almost 8 years ago. A couple of things prompted me - first, I found myself using a well known casebook that really reflected the author’s idea of the proper sequencing and coverage of materials. So I would be assigning things seemingly randomly throughout the casebook so that students would be reading the sections that reflected what I thought they needed to learn. I found that a little uncomfortable, and students didn’t always understand why I was assigning certain sections and skipping others. Second, the price of the materials available always struck me as outrageous. Given that these are largely public documents that we rely on to build the backbone of the casebooks, it makes no sense for these to cost $200 or $300 per book. It was really a combination of being unhappy with what was on offer and with the price that drove me to buckle down one day over the summer and give H2O a shot.

Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. We recently talked about why he started using H2O, how he approaches contract law with his students, and how H2O allows him to customize and adjust his course over time.

Briefly, what courses are you currently teaching or preparing to teach?

I’m teaching contracts, a course about the legal changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and a course titled “Policing the Police.”

You started using H2O in 2019 for your contracts course - what prompted you to transition your course material into H2O?

Charles Fried told me how pleased he was that he had put together a casebook and how happy he was with the assistance provided to him by the library in completing this project. He was so enthusiastic that I sent off for his book, liked it, and decided to try putting together a contracts casebook of my own.

I had enjoyed the casebook I had been using. I knew it thoroughly and its authors were very responsive to me. But it was expensive for the students. And I liked the idea of creating something tailored singularly to my class – a juridical bespoke suit.

In February, professors David Ball, Michelle Oberman, and Mike Flynn at Santa Clara Law School organized a conference to build momentum for open and innovative ways of teaching law. Nearly one hundred faculty members, librarians, OER advocates, and others gathered to hear from the organizers about their experience creating an open casebook, and to talk about how to expand the community around open educational resources for law.

In the summer of 2020, Ball, Oberman, and Flynn used the H2O open casebook platform to collaborate with each other and with their students to create a new criminal law casebook. Leveraging the open licensed resources that were already available in the H2O catalog, the professors took sections of existing books by Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen and Columbia Law professor Tim Wu to build the foundation of their book. They then worked with their students to add in new elements including targeted sections, tailored introductions, student reflections, and news articles and podcasts. In the end they had created their own unique book to add to the criminal law canon, along with a supplementary volume of related materials. Oberman described the process of building the book as her “favorite teaching experience to date.”

H2O has introduced two new ways to help your students discover your published casebooks:

You can now set up an author url

Your profile page now has an option to add a public url. Your students can visit that link to quickly find the casebook for their current class and get interested in other classes they might like to take in the future.

Multiple editions of a casebook can be grouped together

Your dashboard now has an option to manage your casebooks. In the upper right corner, click the Manage Casebooks link, select the different editions of the casebook you would like to group together, then click the Group selected link. You’ll be prompted to provide the common title for the casebooks, and the select the current edition. H2O will display the easy link, based on the title, that the current edition will be available at. Anyone that visits a past edition of the casebook will be able to view it, but will see a message at the top of the page letting them know there’s a more recent edition. Here’s an animation of the process in action.