his text has gone through many editions. The first edition appeared in 2001, published by Aspen Law & Business. The next three editions were published by Foundation Press, up to 2012. This fifth edition breaks with past models and the traditional legal casebook industry. In 2016, I and my new co-author, Alan Butler, have decided to self-publish. Why?

Well, in our view, the costs of legal casebooks have gotten out-of-hand, and legal publishers increasingly do little more than produce the physical item. We’ve decided we can mostly cut out the intermediary, with remarkable cost savings for the reader.

Prior users of the text will see great familiarity with prior editions. Most important, the book is still primarily organized by concepts, not by industry. Although rear-ranged, those concepts remain: power, entry, pricing, access, classification, content, and intermediary. But in this edition, we’ve aggressively simplified and subordinated detail because complexity had gotten out of hand and obscured the bigger picture. We’ve pruned material that may have been useful back in the 2000s but as of 2016, not so much. We’ve also decreased technological detail and regulatory history that were slowing down readers without sufficient pedagogical payoff.

With this edition, we hope to have created a compre-hensive, challenging, yet accessible text that will pay long-lasting educational dividends. And we don’t mind being a little disruptive to a textbook industry that needs to adapt and change. Some online materials helpful to students and professors will continue to be maintained at: https://jerrykang.net/commlaw. Comments are always welcome.

Jerry Kang
July 2016
Los Angeles, CA

Alan Butler
July 2016
Washington, DC