In the summer of 2020, Professors Michelle Oberman, David Ball, and Michael Flynn, along with 11 of their students (Cydney Chilimidos, Miriam Contreras, Jenai Howard, Christina Iriart, Angela Madrigal, Leah Mesfin, Zachary Nemirovsky, Nicholas Newman, Nathanial Perez, Michael Pons, and Philip Yin) published an open-source Criminal Law Casebook. Professors Oberman and Ball have also published a companion book of supplemental materials, Current Challenges in Criminal Law, with long-form writing, interviews, and audio/visual materials that provide additional depth and context to the criminal legal system in the United States.
This project grew out of the authors’ desire to create teaching materials for Criminal Law that were more thoughtful about issues of race, sex, and sexual orientation. Professors Oberman, Ball, and Flynn worked with their students to identify problem areas in traditional teaching materials, to explore how knowledge is produced and culture is transmitted, and to create teaching materials designed to minimize the harms created by legal education’s historical tendency to ignore, if not enshrine, our collective biases. The authors are following up with an online workshop on Friday, February 19, 12p PST, that will facilitate collaboration among professors who want to pursue open-source materials in their own subject areas. More details about the conference can be found HERE; the link to register for the online workshop is HERE.
