Spindle benefits from and incorporates into our organizational system the contributions from our community of researchers (or Spindlers).   Spindlers may add authorities (e.g., cases, rules of evidence and procedure, regulations and statutes) in support of rules and can comment on authorities and branches (topics, rules and references).  While a chief editor often will initiate and develop the structure and oversee the expansion on the site of a section of the law (or what we call a “module”), Spindlers are expected to nurture a module’s growth with more and more law.

Spindle encourages its researchers to vouch for the authorities they contribute or that they review.  As Spindle defines it, vouching means that the researcher agrees that the specific case, statute, procedural or evidentiary rule, etc., is an authority for the branch it is intended to support and that the information (citation, parenthetical, procedural posture, etc.,) listed in Spindle is correct.   If the information is correct, the Spindler simply clicks a button and the authority is marked as vouched.  (If the information is incomplete, it’s easy to correct and then vouch).

Vouching tells Spindlers that the authority has been approved by other researchers.  It doesn’t and shouldn’t obviate the need to read the case, of course, but it’s a good indication for a researcher that the citation is right.  Researchers can see how many people have vouched for the authority and, ultimately, it will be possible to identify other information.  After one Spindler vouches, half a gold seal appears above the authority.  A second Spindler vouches, and the gold seal is completed  .

Researchers can also see if the citation has been edited since it was vouched.  The vouching gold seal turns silver if a Spindler edits the authority’s citation or edits the branch that the authority supported.  Some of the luster of the original vouch comes off, until a Spindler vouches for the revised citation, at which point half the seal turns gold again (and, after a second vouch, the seal turns entirely gold).  We recently debated the value of silver seals and concluded that there’s value in showing that an authority has been vouched for even if it was subsequently edited. For example, we expect that a researcher will find it useful to see that a case was originally vouched for once, or even a number of times, even if it was subsequently edited, rather than wiping away any sign of those prior vouches once the citation has been edited.

When a Spindler vouches for an authority, a gold letter “U”   pops up next to the vouch icon. The vouch icon appears on everyone’s screen, the “U” solely on the researcher’s.  The purpose is to let the researcher keep track of the authorities she’s read and vouched for, much as one might expect someone to mark (or, at least, I would mark) with a tick or an asterisk a case name on a list of cases on a legal pad that the researcher has reviewed.  Like the vouching seal, the “U” turns silver if the authority is edited.

Finally, vouching facilitates the contribution of authorities that a researcher may not have read. For instance, if someone reads the U.S. Supreme Court case, Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Broudo, 544 U.S. 336 (2005), which, among other things, states that ”[t]he securities statutes seek to maintain public confidence in the marketplace.  See United States v. O’Hagan, 521 U. S. 642, 658 (1997),” id. at 345, she can enter both Dura and O’Hagan as authorities for a rule about the securities statutes’ role in maintaining public confidence.  The Spindler should vouch for Dura (having read it) but not for O’Hagan (unless and until she has read that too).  Still, if Justice Breyer, who delivered the Dura decision for the Supreme Court, cites O’Hagan — or any other reliable source cites a decision — we think it is worth contributing it to Spindle. Subsequent researchers will vouch for it.

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We make frequent improvements to the site, every two to three weeks on average, I’d say, usually without announcement.  In the past while, we’ve made a number of enhancements to our handling of authorities—that is, support for legal rules in the system—and I thought it might be worth reporting a bit about them.

We began with authorities based on published federal cases.  Shortly after Peter Tillers began the evidence module, we added support for federal rules of evidence and procedure.  Several weeks ago we added a summary field to all authorities (such as a case summary).  More recently we added United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations, which, obviously important to many areas of federal law, have been getting particularly heavy use by Marcia Gelpe and her research assistants in their work on the Clean Air Act module.  One nifty function we built for that module (I like to say “we,” so I’ll keep saying it, but the development credit goes to Joel) checks U.S.C. citations for Clean Air Act provisions and adds references to sections of the Act where appropriate.  In our most recent update we added the capacity to include multiple (parallel) citations in case law authorities, which has a limited application to federal materials but will be very important in handling state court cases, which is in the works.