UPDATED MARCH 8, 2025 to post a manuscript that has the right version of Chapter 10!
As of March 8, 2025, the most updated version of the manuscript says “Compiled: March 8, 2025” on the cover.

As I noted in a blog post back in 2023, I signed a contract with the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) to manage the editing of an open educational resource (OER) textbook for legal writing in spring 2023. It will be the first general legal-writing text from CALI’s eLangdell press. OER texts are available free of charge and can be remixed and reused under a Creative Commons license. Students who want a print copy will be able to order one, basically at cost, from CALI, but the text is most powerful in its electronic form, thanks to active linking among sections.

Below is the downloadable draft, which I’m calling the antepenultimate draft (a) because I don’t often get to use words like ‘antepenultimate’ and (b) because I expect there will be one more working draft before the final draft comes out in May. It’s important to understand a few things about this version:

• The note to teachers in Chapter 0 of the text explains our rationale for the volume and what we are working on before releasing the final version of the volume in May 2025, including our plans for proofreading, the Teaching Manual (due out in summer), etc. It also gives you an example of how I used the text in the first-semester 1L legal writing course at Texas A&M University (which has a twelve-week semester).
• The file is large, a little over 28 MB.
• The chapters are all substantively complete, but we will continue proofreading and editing. We do not expect any chapter or section numbers to change, however.
• There is no cover (unlike some previous versions) because we are still working on a cover design.
• The links in the text PDF work, except that at the moment, the PDF’s bookmark TOC, normally available in Acrobat from the Bookmarks tab and in Mac Preview from the View menu / Table of Contents option, is broken due to a coding problem we are trying to sort out.

If you have questions or comments about the text, please post them in the comments!

Thanks!

-Brian

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