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.

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