Casebook Builder

Casebook Builder is the Lab’s tool for curating and editing cases into custom course casebooks. It came out of a thread between Ted Ruger, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, and Amanda Runyon about the $500 commercial casebook problem — the basic premise being that AI plus the right tooling should let faculty assemble exactly the casebook their course needs at a fraction of the cost.

The first pilot is Ted Ruger’s Spring 2027 Legislation course.

What we’re doing

• Build the case-selection workflow: pull cases from open sources, support faculty editing (excerpts, notes, headnotes, problems), output a clean casebook in print-ready and student-readable formats.
• Use the Course Materials extraction layer for ingesting source cases so the input pipeline is consistent with the rest of the Teaching Tools cluster.
• Ship the Ruger Legislation pilot for Spring 2027 — full casebook, classroom-tested, with student feedback collected through the semester.
• Document the workflow for other faculty who want to assemble their own casebooks.

Why this matters

Commercial casebooks are expensive, slow to update, and rarely a perfect fit for any specific course. A tool that lets faculty build exactly the casebook they want — with their case selection, their notes, their problems — pulls a lot of value back to the people designing the course. The cost story (students paying $500 for a book the faculty member would happily replace) is the immediate motivation; the pedagogical fit is the bigger one.

Status

Planning. Build scoped for mid-summer 2026, pilot deployment in Ted Ruger’s Spring 2027 Legislation class. Origin discussion with Ruger, Wilkinson-Ryan, and Amanda Runyon.