LibGuides: The Law Guide: Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) for Law

This guide introduces Open Educational Resources (OER) relevant to legal teaching, learning and research.

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?
- OER are freely accessible, openly licensed teaching and learning materials that anyone can use, adapt, and share. Most OER rely on Creative Commons licences—such as CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC BY-NC—which allow educators to reuse and customize content for local curricula.
Why OER matters in law:
- Accessibility: Removes paywall barriers to legal knowledge.
- Cost savings: Reduces textbook and resource costs for students.
- Adaptability: Enables customization for jurisdiction-specific content and teaching needs.
Examples of Integrating OER into Law Teaching
- Adopting an open textbook for a course
- Compiling a custom reader from CC-licensed chapters
- Embedding open-access cases and statutes in Moodle
- Creating and publishing your own OER
Evaluate OER to ensure Quality and Legal Accuracy
- Verify the publisher or repository's reputation
- Check dates of statutes and judgments
- Confirm jurisdictional applicability
- Review peer status for textbooks and articles

OER by Resource Type

CALI (The Center for Computer‑Assisted Legal Instruction)
A nonprofit provider of interactive law school lessons, open casebooks, teaching resources, and practice exercises for doctrinal and skills courses.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
A free, community‑driven discovery service indexing peer‑reviewed open access academic books.
Find@HKUL
Open Access Materials in the Field of Law.
OAPEN
An independent, not-for-profit Dutch foundation that provides global, peer-reviewed open-access books freely available and easily discoverable via its platforms.
Open Textbook Library
A large, searchable repository of peer‑reviewed open textbooks and OER; useful for free, adaptable course texts and supplemental readings.
Pressbooks
A publishing platform and searchable directory for creating, adapting, and discovering openly licensed, editable textbooks and OER—includes numerous law titles and instructor ancillaries.

MERLOT — Law
A peer‑reviewed repository of open learning materials for law: textbooks, case studies, presentations, and multimedia, with filters for level, license, and peer review.
MIT OpenCourseWare — Legal Studies
Free course materials and lecture content from MIT; useful for supplemental readings, lecture videos, and syllabus models in legal studies.
OASIS — Law
A searchable institutional repository of open course materials and OER; filter by subject to find law textbooks, syllabi, lectures, and classroom resources.
OER Commons — Law
A searchable repository of openly licensed law resources (textbooks, activities, lectures, and teaching modules) with filters for level, license, and format.
Teaching Commons — Law
A repository of open textbooks, syllabi, lectures, and faculty teaching materials hosted on the Digital Commons network.

Legal Boolean Search Builder
A free, web-based tool that guides users step-by-step to create precise Boolean search strings for legal research.
The Legal Skills Portal
An HKU online hub offering practical lessons, templates, mock videos, and multilingual guidance across client interviewing, legal research & writing, drafting, ethics, evidence, tech, and international submissions for students, pro bono lawyers, and partners.

Bepress Legal Repository
provides free access to working papers, preprints, and institutional series from top law schools and research centers worldwide
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – Law
A comprehensive index of high-quality, peer-reviewed open access journals. This curated collection focuses on law and legal studies, providing free and unrestricted access to scholarly articles
SSRN - Legal Scholarship
Provides free access to working papers and early-stage research in law.