Textbook format?

[fettuccinealfredo]

Hi all, I'm trying to get a sense of what materials I'll need for 1L - does UAlberta offer unbound copies of casebooks and other textbooks?  Also, are there lockers available in the law building?

[LordDenning]

There are free lockers available in the law building for all the students. For 1L it varies by class/professor, but when I did 1L a couple years ago we needed a physical copy of all the textbooks except for Criminal (for my section we only needed a hard copy of the current Criminal Code). It’s expensive to buy them all at once brand new, but there’s a used book sale at the beginning of every school year where you can easily score all of them for under $200. (Some people just don’t buy books either, which is your prerogative.) 

[fettuccinealfredo]

1 hour ago, LordDenning said:

For 1L it varies by class/professor, but when I did 1L a couple years ago we needed a physical copy of all the textbooks except for Criminal (for my section we only needed a hard copy of the current Criminal Code). It’s expensive to buy them all at once brand new, but there’s a used book sale at the beginning of every school year where you can easily score all of them for under $200. (Some people just don’t buy books either, which is your prerogative.) 

That sounds great - do you know if the bookstore (or any other campus printing services) offers copies with the pages unbound for the purpose of putting them into a binder? I understand that for textbooks it probably depends on the publisher, but in my undergrad if there were coursepacks put together by the prof, these would also be available as a stack of papers so that you could organize them as needed.

[LordDenning]

To my knowledge it really depends on the professor. It might be that some of the profs do this, but none of mine (Adams, O’Byrne, Kaplinsky, Meshel) did at the time except for in Criminal law (taught by Bottos). 2L and 3L are different stories—I barely had to buy any textbooks because almost every casebook we needed was posted online for free by the profs, so you could download/print/organize those however you wanted. Someone else with another cohort’s experience can jump in if they’ve had casebooks posted in 1L—this is just my experience. 

[PsychologicalBug]

On 5/30/2022 at 3:21 PM, fettuccinealfredo said:

That sounds great - do you know if the bookstore (or any other campus printing services) offers copies with the pages unbound for the purpose of putting them into a binder? I understand that for textbooks it probably depends on the publisher, but in my undergrad if there were coursepacks put together by the prof, these would also be available as a stack of papers so that you could organize them as needed.

Re: course packs - I have worked off and on at the Bookstore for years and in my experience there are some LAW classes that have course packs. It will just depend on the instructor. For example, LAW 401 I've always seen have a course pack. 

On 5/30/2022 at 2:03 PM, LordDenning said:

There are free lockers available in the law building for all the students. For 1L it varies by class/professor, but when I did 1L a couple years ago we needed a physical copy of all the textbooks except for Criminal (for my section we only needed a hard copy of the current Criminal Code). It’s expensive to buy them all at once brand new, but there’s a used book sale at the beginning of every school year where you can easily score all of them for under $200. (Some people just don’t buy books either, which is your prerogative.) 

I had no idea that we get free lockers and I am so thrilled!!!