To paraphrase the great Avril Ramona Lavigne, publishers like money and law school is expensive, can I make it any more obvious?
Every year, the average law student spends hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on casebooks. As people with little to no disposable income, students in all areas often struggle to purchase textbooks, many of which can cost several hundred dollars, and law students are no exception. In their 2024–2025 cost of attendance calculation, GW Law estimated the cost of casebooks and supplies to be $2,100 for full-time law students, and $1,580 for part-time students.
Commonly, law school casebooks are authored by law professors and published by one of the Big Legal Publishers™ such as West Academic or Aspen Publishing. These publishers enter into licensing agreements with law professors, oftentimes acquiring exclusive rights to publish the casebook and each subsequent edition. The publishers then sell the casebooks to distributors or directly to the students. As such, the publishers set the minimum price of the casebooks, not the law professors that authored them.
These licensing agreements are similar to those in the entertainment industry — many professors sign these predatory agreements early in their careers and later regret the restrictions they impose. One of my law professors has even bemoaned their lack of control over the price of their casebooks to students, recounting that they requested a lower price from the publisher to no avail.
Casebooks are used by law professors around the country, and are usually assigned in their classes to preface or supplement in-person lectures. Here at GW Law, we are incredibly lucky to have several casebook authors as our own professors, and when they assign their own casebooks, there is a clear advantage to having the professor and the assigned text so in sync. Most professors, meanwhile, review available casebooks and select the one that best supplements their intended course lectures.
While it continues to be the norm for many professors to assign expensive casebooks, some have turned to “open source” casebooks. Open source casebooks are authored by law professors and other experts and are functionally identical to the publishers’ casebooks in most respects. What is not identical, however, is the price. These casebooks are free. Yes, free. Open source casebooks are just as high quality, but they are not published by the big name publishers. Instead, the authors themselves publish these casebooks, often online. Open source casebooks are thus free for all students and practitioners to peruse at their leisure.
The best part is that any professor can use open source casebooks for their classes. Some professors at GW Law have already opted to use open source casebooks for their courses, preferring these inexpensive alternatives over the exorbitant prices of publisher casebooks. One such example is the casebook used in Professor Brauneis’ Trademark and Unfair Competition course, authored by NYU Law’s Professor Barton Beebe. Another is a Torts casebook authored by Professor Eric Johnson, used by Professor Liu for her 1L Torts course. Both of these casebooks have the added benefit of being searchable pdfs and available offline.
If any professor can use these open source casebooks, why don’t they all? These casebooks are written by experts, contain most of the same cases, and explain the relevant concepts just as well. Moreover, many professors do not even follow their assigned casebooks, instead using them for background and relying more on their in-person lectures. Students are already spending almost ten thousand dollars in tuition for each class they take — is there really any need to force them to pay an additional $350+ on casebooks that they may or may not actually use?
I don’t have an answer to these questions. What I can do is urge all our professors, especially our many newly hired law professors still figuring out their syllabi, to please consider using open source casebooks. They are just as good (if not better), and they don’t force students to take out an additional $2,000 in loans per year. Some of my best classes had open source textbooks, and I have used many a $350 casebook that I can only assume were written by a very enterprising 2L.
To borrow from another of our great poets, go easy on me, baby.
