An Indiana Law School case book died last week in a hail of gunfire, according to reports today from the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog and elsewhere.

A third-year law student at Indiana was arrested last week and charged with criminal recklessness after an incident in which he fired at least two rifle rounds from the balcony of his apartment in Bloomington.  (Do two rounds qualify as a "hail"?  Well, close enough.)   Police investigators said the man had an AR-15 and an AK-47 in his apartment, though the report did not say whether investigators had linked either one of those weapons to the shooting.  The victim, a casebook entitled "Real Estate Transfer, Finance, and Development: Cases and Materials," was found lifeless in the parking lot of the apartment complex, pierced by two bullets, and mourned by no one.

Let’s be thankful that no one else was harmed in the incident, but let’s also take it as a warning that some action needs to be taken to better protect our nation’s law students.  Clearly, "Real Estate Transfer" is much too thin to hide behind at only 1248 pages — even with hardcovers, this was not nearly enough to stop a bullet.  It’s probably not practical to add many more pages, so we should consider making the contents even more dense to give our students a fighting chance.

Maybe we can make the covers out of depleted uranium.

The shooter has been suspended, barred from campus, and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, all of which suggests that the judge in Bloomington has never actually had to read a 1248-page casebook called "Real Estate Transfer, Finance, and Development: Cases and Materials."

Link: WSJ Law Blog