Having built his Torts Playlist on H2O, Prof. Jonathan Zittrain was interested in converting that work into a physical casebook. Utilizing H2O’s new export feature and with the assistance of Jordi Weinstock and Samantha Bates, edited cases and commentary were pulled out of H2O and, after some additional formatting work, a casebook was created & printed for Prof. Zittrain’s 1L course at Harvard Law School.


Boston College Associate Professor Brian Quinn has been an H2O user since 2013. He has used H2O to teach his Corporations course for the past two years, but this year he took the Corporations playlist he created in H2O and published it in book form on Amazon and CreateSpace.

On April 4th, Adam and Brett from the H2O team presented at LegalEd’s “Igniting Law Teaching” conference. This was a TEDx-styled conference, with presenters given 7 minutes to discuss their topic in a dynamic, energetic style. Brett introduced H2O to those attending, describing it as personal, practical, collaborative and flexible.

We’re very excited indeed to note that Professor Pam Karlan of Stanford Law School has made the first installment of her Fall 2013 Torts class materials on H2O; those materials are available at https://opencasebook.org/casebooks/17378-karlan-torts-materials-part-i/.

Professor Karlan has added and selected an array of edited cases (some adapted from edits by other H2O users, such as Professor Jonathan Zittrain, and others she edited from scratch). Professor Karlan has also added many new introductions, and has included numerous links to videos and other external sources (see, for instance, her collection of materials for “An Introduction to Torts.”

Last month, we were thrilled that H2O received a mention in a Bloomberg article by HLS students Raja Bobbili and Daniel Doktori titled “Harvard Law School Can Learn from MOOCs.” After noting that the H2O initiative “has reinvented the legal textbook by creating an open-source platform that allows students and professors to read collaboratively, sharing questions, edits and annotations,” Bobbili and Doktori conclude that “this effort should expand to become the norm.”