Free online US law education without a degree?
July 26, 2016 6:13 AM   Subscribe

There are a wealth of resources for online education. Can anyone point me to resources for free online US law courses, or even good plans for studying law? I would also be interested in history courses that cover law and the (primarily US) courts. I am not interested in pursuing an actual law degree.
posted by OmieWise to Education (14 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
The Legal Information Institute at Cornell has the text of many statutes, and some resources for helping to read the statutes.

Google Scholar is a good place to go for cases interpreting those statutes.
posted by Handstand Devil at 7:29 AM on July 26, 2016


This is a little difficult to answer, because each state has different laws. There is also an overarching federal law. If you have something in particular that you are looking for, you may want more specific suggestions rather than general ones.

Notwithstanding the above, Coursera has a number of classes involving the law (including An Introduction to American Law from UPenn). ITunes University also offers a number of legal courses, but I couldn't get a course listing.

Specific universities offer their own classes as well. MIT has some courses that involve the law (including Introduction to Copyright Law, Law and Society in US History, and Gender and the Law in US History). Yale offers Environmental Politics and Law. U Cal Berkeley also offers a couple of Environmental Law courses.

Professionals take classes known as CLEs, or Continuing Legal Education. They teach the law, but the classes assume that you have a foundation for the topic. A quick search for "Free CLE" came up with this site, which lists ten places that offer classes. Bar Membership may be required.

Offline, you could visit your local law library. Typically housed in or near the Courthouse, libraries I have seen also contain some books dealing with the study of law. Ask the librarian, and they may be able to point you in the right direction.

Hopefully something in here leads you to learning about the law. Good luck!
posted by China Grover at 7:42 AM on July 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


Could you be more specific? Law is a pretty broad field, and most of it is extremely esoteric. There's not much reason to learn a lot of caselaw unless you're actually involved in a case. And there are numerous sub-disciplines, so what you learn in criminal law is unrelated to what you learn in contracts, which is unrelated to what you learn in constitutional law. Is there a specific sub-discipline you'd like to learn more about? Are you looking for a basic introduction to how our legal system works? The more detail you could go into, the better recommendations I can give you.

Also, do you have access to an academic or law library? There are a lot of subscription-based online resources that are really helpful. Pretty much every law library (your county bar association probably maintains one) and a lot of academic libraries (especially if the college has a law school) subscribe and offer their patrons free access. Some public libraries do, but that's more hit or miss.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:45 AM on July 26, 2016


If you're interested in legal history, focus on either intro to law courses or constitutional law. Those are probably the two courses I remember from law school that were taught in a chronological fashion.
posted by craven_morhead at 7:52 AM on July 26, 2016


You probably already know that there are a few states--California is one of them--that allow you to practice law if you pass the bar without having gone to law school. This is probably not the angle of your inquiry, but just in case & FYI nonetheless.
posted by tapir-whorf at 8:21 AM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Via Open Culture: Free online law courses

Sadly, Constitutional Law 101 is not on that list.
posted by MonkeyToes at 9:13 AM on July 26, 2016


Erwin Chemerinsky wrote the gold standard for Constitutional Law textbooks. You could totally self-study from it. Search for Con Law outlines if you would like a boost.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:26 PM on July 26, 2016


The nonprofit Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) has online interactive tutorials in legal subjects and eBooks.
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:54 PM on July 26, 2016


Here are a few courses on the Constitution and its interpretation. Oyez has oral argument, and SCOTUSblog has news and commentary, and full opinions are here.

Radiolab has a new project called More Perfect exploring the Supreme Court (YMMV depending on how you feel about Radiolab's editing and tone). Dahlia Lithwick writes about law and the courts for Slate and has covered the past two terms on her podcast.

Here is an overview of statewide legal services websites aimed at those seeking legal help, which may be a good starting point for some areas of civil and criminal law.
posted by earth by april at 4:22 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


If you can self-study and you care broadly about federal and state law from criminal to civil to paper, you could always buy a set of couple-years-old BAR/BRI prep books off Ebay, Amazon, Craigslist, etc.
posted by sallybrown at 5:22 PM on July 26, 2016


I just now stumbled across this series of podcasts from the National Constitution Center.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:49 PM on July 26, 2016


As someone who was an engineer going in, and is now several years out of law school, I think of law school as a two-part proposition: first, you have to learn to "think like a lawyer," by which I mean split up a problem into sub-parts, and then figure out which of the sub-parts are important and which are not; and second, of the important sub-parts, you look up statutes, regulations and cases (in more-or-less that order) to figure out what may happen given the sub-parts you have identified. (Or, given those sub-parts and a desire to increase or decrease the odds of the "normal" thing happening, you look for ways to change or characterize the sub-parts to move your odds.)

A lot of the "split up and triage" is just directed practice. When you're starting out at thinking like a lawyer, you'll split wrong and put two things together that should be separate, or separate two things that should go together. And you'll throw away important clues, or waste time thinking about unimportant ones. Law school is (moderately) good at teaching people to think like that, although they neglect to tell you how to turn it off, so people generally dislike lawyers.

For the second part, you can look up a lot of statutes, rules and cases online. The commercial databases (Lexis and Westlaw) mostly provide good search tools for finding stuff, even though a lot of the stuff is publicly available. Many court libraries are publicly accessible and have Lexis or Westlaw available. And law librarians are (IME) smart, friendly, and happy to show you how to use Westlaw or the old-fashioned books.

Once you have "think like a lawyer" and "where can I find the statute or case that talks about this fact that I think is important," you're on your way. You can figure out anything a lawyer can figure out, and you can also understand treatises and law articles, which are written in a standard "split up, identify important parts, here are the important relevant laws" form.
posted by spacewrench at 9:55 PM on July 26, 2016


Oh, and they're less structured than what you're looking for, but the podcasts More Perfect and Life of the Law are both excellent
posted by craven_morhead at 7:40 AM on July 27, 2016


Some of the edX courses offered by Harvard might meet your needs ("Law" is one of the subjects you can filter by). I would suggest starting with some courses before jumping into statutes or cases (or, God forbid, Barbri outlines) because they are very dense and dry, and you won't have much context.
posted by Carmelita Spats at 9:34 PM on July 27, 2016


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