Wonderful Websites for Law Teachers
by
Kay Lundwall

Whether you are an experienced "surfer" or are just beginning to dip into the sea of information available on the World Wide Web, here are four Websites you will really want to visit.

Law Exams Online

Stuck for ideas for your final exams? There are a number of sites where you can view exams drafted by other law professors. The oldest site is the one created by Harvard Law School. This site contains exams given to Harvard law students over the past five years. Type in www.law.harvard.edu/academics. Click on "Examination Books." You will have to choose the examination books for a particular year. The next screen allows you to choose exams arranged alphabetically by subject matter. For example, click on "C" for "corporations". Some of the other law schools posting old exams include the universities of Arkansas, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Electronic Classrooms

Teaching a course for the first time or merely curious about how your colleagues at other schools teach your course? Visit the virtual classrooms at www.lexis.com. Click on the "Law Schools" link, and at the next screen click on "Virtual Classes." On the virtual classroom page, click on "Go to Course List," where you will find a list of virtual classes arranged alphabetically by school. (Be patient: it takes a few minutes for the list of schools to load.) While teachers who have produced virtual classrooms have the option to "lock the classroom door" and assign passwords to their students (and others) for entry, most classroom materials are freely accessible. The wealth of materials can be impressive. You may find a course syllabus, schedule of assignments, problems with student or teacher model answers, class exercises, copies of computer-generated slides and lecture notes, links to interesting cases or other relevant online information, cartoons, classroom discussion boards, and copies of old exams with critiques by the instructor. If you find a helpful site, be sure to e-mail compliments and questions to the person who created the site and ask permission to use material from the site. (Westlaw offers a similar electronic classroom called TWEN.) When you are ready to create a virtual classroom of your own, both Lexis and Westlaw will provide excellent assistance. Check with your regional Westlaw or Lexis reps.

Lists of Listservs

Are you feeling isolated? Do you have questions about your course material or want to discuss teaching techniques with colleagues at other schools? The University of Chicago has compiled a list of listservs (which are e-mail group-discussion lists).

If you go to www.lib.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/law-lists and type in "teaching", you will get a list of about 25 specialized listservs. Some are very general, such as LAWPROF, while others are restricted to a particular specialty, such as IMMPROF (immigration law professors), TAXPROF, BIZLAW, and DIRCON97 (restricted to directors of legal research and writing programs). Still other listservs focus on methods rather than subject matter: E-TEACH (discussion of electronic teaching and learning issues) and LEGALED (a United Kingdom-based discussion board for teaching and learning issues). The listserv list has a brief description of the focus of each listserv along with directions for adding your name to the subscription list.

Required Reading

Professor Bernard Hibbitts of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law publishes THE JURIST at www.jurist.law.pitt.edu. This site, created for law faculty, contains daily annotated links highlighting headline legal news stories; a forum in which law professors discuss legal implications and ramifications of top stories; a law school "feed" section which runs press releases, professional and academic announcements; and tips submitted by law schools. This site also contains subject guides, course pages (similar to the virtual classroom materials), conference and job announcements, and all sorts of other topics geared to law professors.