William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
Abstract
My reflections are those of someone who co-edited/co-authored two casebooks that were commercially and intellectually successful and one that was intellectually but not commercially successful. I start with the assumption that people decide to do a casebook because they find that existing materials don’t do some things they think ought to be done in the course (and do some things that aren’t really necessary for teaching purposes). That is, doing a casebook is at the outset an intellectual project.
Executing that project runs up against some constraints almost immediately. A simple one is that you might well think that you have a good grasp of many important issues your book has to cover if you’re to carry out your project but that you have a less sure grasp of other similarly important issues. Another comes from the market. You know that your intellectual vision for the book tells you that some topic really isn’t all that important and should be omitted in favor of deeper treatment of some other topics, but you also know that no one is going to assign your book unless it has something about the topic you think unimportant (it appears on bar exams, for example, or because tradition is too deeply bred in to resist completely). For some courses another market constraint is length (not, it seems, price!).
Some of these problems have an obvious solution: Find someone to collaborate with and divide the work between/among you. Collaboration can be a mixed blessing. It has its downsides but can be fruitful intellectually and even commercially.
This abstract has been taken from the text of the article.