Designing Electronic Casebooks that Talk Back : The Cato Program

Electronic casebooks offer important benefits of flexibility in control of presentation, connectivity, and interactivity. These additional degrees of freedom, however, also threaten to overwhelm students. If casebook authors and instructors are to achieve their pedagogical goals, they will need new methods for guiding students. This paper presents three such methods developed in an intelligent tutoring environment for engaging students in legal role-playing, making abstract concepts explicit and manipulable, and supporting pedagogical dialogues. This environment is built around a program known as CATO, which employs artificial intelligence techniques to teach first-year law students how to make basic legal arguments with cases. Ongoing improvements in CATO point the way for electronic casebooks to engage students in realistic analogical legal arguments. By reorganizing the electronic casebook's explicit information about cases and implicit knowledge of argumentation along the lines of CATO's knowledge sources, it is possible to orchestrate a real dialogue between a book and its reader