Will Law Schools Go the Distance? An Annotated Bibliography on Distance Education in Law

Although distance education is not a new phenomenon, the advent of multimedia courseware and the wide availability of Internet access has made the off-campus approach to teaching college and graduate level education more alluring. The stigma that attached to old correspondence courses as second-rate education has not carried over to modern techniques. Current technology can allow for the same quality programming as on-campus courses, with just as much timeliness. Consequently, many schools of higher education have integrated a distance education component into their curriculum, with more and more establishing or expanding their programs every year.

The exceptions to the movement so far seem to be the nation's law schools, which have shown some reluctance to diversify their approaches to teaching law classes. The reluctance stems, at least in part, from concerns about maintaining rigorous standards, interschool cooperation, methods of payment, and so on. Still, there has been some recent movement, with a few experimental and well-publicized courses being offered around the country. As those courses, and those to come, prove themselves, interest by law school decision makers and governing boards will likely increase. Distance education is therefore clearly looming in the immediate future of the legal education establishment and has the potential to revolutionize legal education. This short but comprehensive bibliography has been prepared to help interested parties in legal education inform themselves about certain aspects of distance education.