Council of Australian Law Deans (CALD) and Legal Education Associate Deans (LEAD) Network call to Legal Publishers during COVID-19

The Council of Australian Law Deans (CALD), being the peak body representing Australian law schools,  and the Legal Education Associate Deans (LEAD) Network, representing Associate Deans – Teaching & Learning or equivalent from Australian law schools, offer sincere thanks and appreciation to Cambridge Core for making free e-texts available to an unlimited number of simultaneous users until the end of Semester 1, 2020.

CALD and LEAD call upon legal publishers to assist law schools to provide students with electronic access to e-books and e-resources with unlimited simultaneous users while law libraries remain closed  as a result of COVID-19.  Where this cannot be accommodated, CALD and LEAD ask publishers of prescribed and recommended texts for any law subject/ unit/course to provide gratis e-books to students in the equity category.  These students cannot afford to purchases texts and normally rely on law libraries high-use collections for access to key books for their subjects/units/courses. The position of CALD and LEAD is that there is no loss to legal publishers in terms of sales of hard copy books nor personal copies of e-texts because, in any case, these students would not have purchased these books. Law libraries have already purchased multiple copies of these hardcopy texts, however they are not currently available to students, nor do libraries have enough copies to meet the needs of our students in financial distress.

CALD and LEAD thanks all legal publishers for their assistance during these very challenging times, and appreciates any support that can be offered to our students throughout the impact of COVID-19.