Insight into the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI)

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) is a nonprofit consortium of over 200 US law schools. Non-US law schools, law firms, business schools, paralegal programs and individuals can also join CALI to support its mission.

History
After a few years as a faculty project, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction was incorporated as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) in 1982 by the University of Harvard's and University of Minnesota's law schools. CALI continued to gradually develop computer-assisted tutorials and add more law school members through the 80s and into the early 90s.

In 1991 the organization hosted the first annual Conference for Law School Computing®. With the development of CALI Author® software, lesson creation was taken out of the hands of computer programmers and into those of the faculty whom write the lessons. Aided by the new authoring software and the revolution of the internet as a viable platform, the library of lessons and their usage increased to over 100 and over 100,000, respectively, by the 1996-1997 school year. That same year, CALI began distributing the CALI Excellence for the Future Award® to the top student in each class at participating member schools.

By the turn of the century nearly all US law schools were members of CALI. CALI began looking for new and innovative ways to serve its membership, exploring ideas such as distance education, eBooks, blogging and podcasting, and open education tools. In 2007-2008 school year, students for the first time ran CALI Lessons over 1,000,000 total times in the school year.

Today students at over 200 member law schools still run over 1,000,000 lessons each year. The Library of Lessons is on pace for 1,000 lessons very soon. It continues to host the annual CALI Conference, distribute CALI Awards, and work on new and innovative projects like eLangdell® (open eBooks for legal education) and Classcaster® (a blogging platform for members).

Visit the homepage os CALI at: http://www.cali.org/

CALI offers: a) webinars, so e.g., Topics in Digital Law practice: http://tdlp.classcaster.net/
b) Classcaster®. It is CALI's free blogging and podcasting network. It allows professors to create free class blogs and post educational materials. It includes support for creating and posting recorded lectures.

c) CALI Author: it is a lesson authoring software. You can it to edit lessons or to create completely new ones.

d) CALI's eLangdell Press offers free, open eBooks for legal education. Visit the eLangdell's website: http://elangdell.cali.org/

CALI also organises conferences: http://www.cali.org/CALI-Conference, provides awards: http://www.cali.org/awards and lessons: http://www.cali.org/lesson