IT In Law School ?

Q: I am curious about the usage of computers and the Internet at other law schools ( I attend Suffolk Law School in Boston) Specifically, do many students bring laptops to class for either note taking or connecting to some kind of course platform provided by the school? Do many law professors have web sites for their classes? If so, do they update the sites frequently? Are the sites useful? Do many students communicate via email? school-wide newsgroup/listserve? Has anyone used electronic casebooks?

A:I'm at Georgetown. I used a laptop for notes for my entire first year. Had to rely largely on battery power, as many classrooms are not yet wired. Money is being spent to get there, however. One classroom is already set up as the "classroom of the future", with plug-ins and modem links at each desk. Haven't had a class there yet though. One of my professors during my first year used the Web. He had a discussion board set up off the Georgetown Law Main Web Page. We could go in, pick a topic and either ask a question, post a comment we didn't get to make in class, clarify something we did say, or even just start a random new thread. I LOVED it!! It was a great way to gear from everyone, and you also get people who will type things they wouldn't say out loud (for whatever reason) in a million years! Haven't tried an electronic casebook, but I am dying to!!! I am so sick of all the wasted paper at this school...! the school uses e-mail to

make announcements and to contact individuals. That's pretty effective. They also have a couple of newsgroups, but they are virtually worthless. The thing I object to most about UCLA's set-up is that you either have to log in at school, or if you do so from home, you dial in as a Novell node in order to get access to law school-only info. Instead, what they should do is simply require the law school students to use the UCLA campus system (a much better system) and make the protected information (law school-only) accessible through a password. As it stands, the system they have is less useful to us and more costly for them. I have no idea why they do it this way.