Thursday, September 18, 2008

AudioCaseFiles: Assignments on your iPod?

Law students are natural multitaskers, but even the most dedicated 1L wouldn't risk the embarrassment of reading a casebook on the treadmill. Enter AudioCaseFiles, a relatively new web site which offers MP3 downloads of more than 1,000 cases from the most popular law school casebooks. It's an ideal service for auditory learners, those with long commutes, and perhaps even insomniacs.

AudioCaseFiles offers the option to browse cases by topic or by casebook, and includes several from the Duke Law booklist (such as Kadish's Criminal Law and Its Processes: Cases and Materials and Friedenthal's Civil Procedure: Cases and Materials, among others).

If listening to court opinions isn't your idea of a good time, AudioCaseFiles has also expanded into video, with more than 4,000 hours of footage from actual trials in a variety of practice areas. (View the list by case names; you can also sort video offerings by practice area.) Trial practice students, in particular, may be interested in viewing real case videos.

Users must be registered with the service to download any media on the site; Duke Law students may now register for AudioCaseFiles with their law school e-mail account. AudioCaseFiles is now linked from the library's Legal Databases & Links page, under the "Legal Links" column.