Making the case for open-access law texts

Earlier this year, we asked our teaching faculty to tell us who among them were offering innovative learning experiences, environments, and/or introducing new ways of overcoming barriers in their classes. This is part five in a six-part series recognizing teaching faculty at UBC.

In 2020, months into teaching tort law at the Peter A. Allard School of Law, Assistant Professor Samuel Beswick was struck by inspiration. With new judgments being decided every day and freely accessible online, he wanted to break away from the commercially published casebook model and bring the law to his students in an open educational medium.

So, with the help of his JD research assistant Maddison Zapach, Sam embarked on a project to create Canada’s first online open-access torts casebook—a format enabling him to innovate both in the selection of civil wrongdoing cases his class would study, and in the way students would access them.

“I wanted to customize my materials, and there were a couple of themes that I wanted to convey through the subject, such as the idea that we’re all supposed to be equal under the law,” Sam explains, noting that when he studied law in his home country of New Zealand, course readings were typically a set of photocopied or printed cases and articles assembled by the professor.

In North America, printed and bound casebooks are the standard which, says Sam, are not only cumbersome and costly for students but can be more limiting to teach from. “As a student, I was used to reading a ramshackle compilation of whatever a professor put together, and I quite liked that,” he shares. “An off-the-shelf copy has to be replaced with each new edition, and the copy is not easily customizable if you want to supplement or change up your own teaching.”

Establishing new links

Sam also supplemented the casebook with quizzes and exam exercises—along with links to podcasts, videos, blogs, news, articles and original judgment transcripts. As an indication of its scope, when printed in full, the first edition came in at a whopping 800 letter-sized pages. “I did send the PDF to the UBC Bookstore to be printed and spiral bound for students to buy at cost, and it was a bit of a mistake to print out the whole thing,” Sam admits, explaining that he encouraged his students to have a physical copy for use during exams. “This year, I’m not including the pages that I know I'm not going to teach, so it’s a much slimmer, and cheaper, volume.”

The response from his students has been overwhelmingly positive, who have given the resource top marks for usability and content. One typical response from an anonymous student survey reads: “I love the coursebook because it is inexpensive, and there are online and print versions. I also greatly appreciate the quizzes for exam prep.” More than one said it was their favourite textbook.