Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

you’re out of luck.  if the outlines are based on your lectures then their work product is an original expression because you don’t have a copyright in your voice.  even if you could establish copyright (based maybe on the notes from which you lecture), then they have a pretty good fair use defense because the outline is highly transformative, even though their being created for economical uses.  but i definitely encourage testing the errors in the outlines, that’s classic.

Professor,

There’s actually a way for students to get them for free.  SwapNotes (http://www.swapnotes.com) is a site that I’m running with a few others, including students.  There are, last I checked, over a dozen outlines and note sets based on your BA casebook.

If you’d like, I can contact you offblog about the site.  I can email you the outlines too, so you’ll have no need to go from school to school.

--AJS

Why are you so bent out of shape about this?

THe other day you seemed to protest the fact that copies of your previous exams were available.  At my law school such exams, and often model answers, were on reserve in the library.

And, back when I was in law schooll in the pre-internet days, outlines of almost all courses were regularly handed down from previous students.  Why would this bother you?  You are, presumably, just reworking and polishing your lectures from the previous year - why do you care if students work along off of your previous outline and update and annotate it as they see fit?

ANd, sorry to burst your bubble about testing on the mistakes, but (in my experience) the outlines are very true to the professor’s lectures.  In fact, in my wills and trust class, some smartass had noted in the outline each place where the professor turned the page in her lecture notes and it was spot on except where the professor had updated or revised portions of the lecture.

It doesn’t matter whether a student OBTAINS an outline.  It’s the creation of the outline that imparts the knowledge in my experience.  Reading someone else’s (or a Gilberts or an Emmanuals or whatever the favorite commercial product available today is) won’t prepare a student for an exam like making his or her own outline.