Our latest update to Spindle Law includes a number of small enhancements and bug fixes.   To highlight two of them:

As David already described, we don’t collect cases and other legal documents.   Instead, where possible, we provide links to where you can read the primary material on other sites.  Until this update, we only provided links to cases.  We now provide links to source material for all the different types of authorities that we currently support.  In addition to cases, this includes the United States Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, and Federal Rules of Evidence and of Procedure.  As with cases, we provide links to both free and pay sites.   For the links to the free sites for USC and CFR we use the handy citer tool from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, which will find the material either on LII’s own site or a government site.   For the rules of evidence and procedure, we link directly to the material on LII.

When editing branches we’ve had a feature for quite some time that allows you to edit multiple branches at the same time by using the “tree view” link.  This allows you to open the tree as much as you want, so that you can easily move branches around, create new branches, and edit existing branches.    This feature has been enhanced with a new “save & continue” button.  This will allow you to save all the work that you have done so far while continuing to edit branches.  When you’re done editing, the “save” button will save all your work and end your edit session as before.  The “cancel” button will also end your edit session but will undo all your work since your last “save & continue”.

Simon Fodden of Slaw has a post about Spindle Law this morning.  It’s a “a highly sophisticated setup,” he says.  “At every turn there are icons and other guides to explain and amplify what you’re seeing. Everything works. And a lot of thought has gone into the arrangements for verifying the accuracy and worth of the propositions contributed.”  He expects it to be “a boon to busy practitioners and students.”

If you don’t know Slaw, it is, in its own words, “a cooperative Canadian weblog on things legal.”  I’ve been a regular reader for about as long as it’s been around and recommend it to Canadians and non-Canadians alike.

This afternoon, I made the second of two presentations of Spindle Law in evidence courses taught at Columbia Law School.  Professors Daniel Richman and Kenneth Feinberg allowed me to sit in on their classes and carved out time for a demonstration of the site with particular emphasis on our evidence section.  We hope students at Columbia, and elsewhere, (as well as lawyers, of course) will find the site helpful as they learn about and practice evidence law and that they’ll be switched on to contributing to the site.