Parent company Independent Distribution Worldwide Official website www.cap-press.com Founded 1974 | Status Active Nonfiction topics Law, Academic Texts Founder Keith Sipe Country of origin United States of America | |
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Publication types Books, Educational Software Headquarters location Durham, North Carolina, United States | ||
Carolina Academic Press (also known as CAP) is an academic publisher of books and software. Since entering the legal education market in the late 1970s, Carolina Academic Press has become a major publisher of law school textbooks. Today, CAP publishes more than 100 books a year in academic fields ranging from legal education and criminal justice to anthropology and african studies. In 2011, CAP released its first software package, Core Grammar for Lawyers, which has been used by more than half of the law schools in the United States.
History
Keith Sipe founded Carolina Academic Press in 1974. Sipe began publishing after living in Pakistan on a Fulbright scholarship. The press's first titles were American editions of foreign scholarship. The first title to use the CAP imprint was India/China: Underdevelopment and Revolution by the widely known journalist, Nigel Harris. Within a few years, however, CAP was publishing original scholarship and began entering new markets. The first manuscript signed was Richard Remnek's, Soviet Scholars and Soviet Foreign Policy which was published in 1975.
In 1978, Carolina Academic Press published Plain English for Lawyers by Richard Wydick. Arriving at a time when the plain English reform movement was reaching national popularity, the book soon became what the New York Times called the "most popular legal text today." The book's success spurred CAP to enter the legal publishing field, where it is now a major publisher in the law school market.
On January 1, 2016, Carolina Academic Press acquired the Law School Publishing Division of LexisNexis. This acquisition added more than 500 new titles to the CAP list.
CAP is headquartered in the historic Fitzgerald office building near downtown Durham. The building was built by Richard Fitzgerald, the son of a freed slave, around 1890. In addition to being a master brickmaker and supplying bricks used in many of Durham's historic buildings, Richard Fitzgerald was also responsible for raising his granddaughter, noted African-American lawyer and civil rights activist Pauli Murray.