Friday, August 28, 2009

Goin' Back to CALI

If you’ve visited the Goodson Law Library recently, you may have noticed a mysterious box of DVDs on the service desk. These discs contain more than 800 interactive legal tutorials from CALI, the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (http://www.cali.org).

First-year students will use CALI later this semester to complete a Bluebook exercise in LARW class. However, your experience with CALI shouldn’t stop there. CALI lessons are available for all of the major areas of law school study, and range from 10-minute reviews of a single concept (Defenses) to multi-part tutorials to be completed over several days (a sprawling Contracts review). Most tutorials will take between 30-60 minutes, and their target completion time is clearly indicated before you begin. Each lesson is authored by a law school instructor or librarian, and is carefully reviewed before publication in order to ensure clarity and helpfulness.

For the most current versions of the tutorials on the CALI DVD (or for those who don't wish to load the DVD on their computers), Duke Law students may use the law school’s authorization code to register with the CALI website and take tutorials online. You’ll use the authorization code once to register an account at CALI.org, and will need to create a username and password for future visits. CALI has prepared a helpful 2-minute video to explain the registration process.