A law professor and student team from William Mitchell College of Law have contributed extensively to the Environmental Law section of Spindle Law. Professor Marcia Gelpe is Spindle Law’s chief editor of the Clean Air Act (CAA) and Clean Water Act (CWA). She has been working for a few years building out these sections by adding law, rules, authorities and comments, beginning with the Clean Air Act. Last year, Kit Donnelly joined Professor Gelpe by adding to the CAA and CWA, especially the CWA’s dredge and fill provisions.

Professor Gelpe studied zoology and biology before turning to the law.  “I went to law school at Indiana University specifically to study environmental law in an era before this was a recognized field,” she said. She then worked for the general counsel’s office of the Environmental Protection Agency before starting her legal teaching career at William Mitchell in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Professor Gelpe also founded the Center for Environmental Law at Netanya Academic College in Natanya, Israel. She splits her time between Israel and Saint Paul.

Professor Gelpe recalled her decision to teach in Israel:

I work in two legal systems and in two languages. It is both challenging and interesting. When I first came to Israel, I knew I would be teaching Israeli law. I recalled that in law school we were told that if we knew the general principles of law, we could learn the law in any area. I had told my students the same thing. My experience in Israel put that to the test. I had to learn Israeli law largely on my own and use my knowledge of legal principles to understand what I was learning.

She notes that students in Israel tend to have more world experience before attending an undergraduate law program, as most have served in the military, worked, and traveled first. American students tend to enter law school immediately after college, although Professor Gelpe noted that many William Mitchell students “are older and have had significant careers before beginning law school. I love the perspective they contribute to class experiences.” Like their Israeli counterparts, “William Mitchell students are very sincere and truly interested in learning how to be good lawyers.”

In her teaching, Professor Gelpe encourages students to conceptualize the law in outline form, which the structure of Spindle Law reflects. She believes students, scholars, and practitioners can benefit from visualizing the structure of the law.  When she’s not working, Professor Gelpe enjoys spending time with her husband Dennis, and their three children and three grandchildren. She also reads, writes, take classes on Jewish history and writings and on the Talmud, and walks the hills of Jerusalem or around the lakes in Minneapolis.

Kit Donnelly has been Marcia Gelpe’s research assistant since January 2010. Since that time, he’s been adding to Spindle Law.  Professor Gelpe and Kit used to meet face to face to collaborate on the structure and content of their portion of Spindle’s online legal treatise. Now, their exchanges all happen by email.

When he graduates, Kit hopes to work in the public sector relating to environmental regulation, where he wants to gain litigation experience.  He described the process of  turning a body of law into rules and authorities in Spindle Law as “an excellent exercise in analytical thinking.”

Much of what I do can be thought of as translation. My job is to read through existing law found in statutes and regulations, as well as the cases that interpret those laws. From there I must determine how to organize all of the information in a manner that allows researchers to find what they need by continuously narrowing their search, rather than simply trying to find the correct combination of search terms.

Spindle forces you to develop an in-depth understanding of the law. In particular, Spindle allows you to see and understand how the law is organized, and how one rule is related to the next. A law school education has a tendency to be somewhat disjointed in that you learn a rule and then move on to the next topic without necessarily being taught how that rule relates to everything else. Working on Spindle gives you that extra piece, allowing you to develop a more substantial, and more lasting, understanding of the law.

Kit is also a percussionist and a drummer in the folk rock band Whipstitch and the electronic group Neon Mitten.

Law students across the country are preparing for final exams of the spring term.  If you’re one of them and are preparing for an evidence exam, check out the Evidence module on Spindle Law. Peter Tillers, law professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, is creator and editor of this module, having added over 1,600 branches and 1,600 authorities, as well as a great deal of commentary on the subtleties of evidence law in the comments to those rules and authorities. While Professor Tillers’s section on Spindle Law lays out evidence rules and exceptions in a straightforward, intuitive way, his interest in evidence goes far beyond the rules themselves.

In June, Professor Tillers will be chairing an all-day workshop during the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL). The workshop is called Artificial Intelligence & Evidential Inference. Tillers said, “Panelists include many of the leading experts on legal reasoning, logic and practical reasoning in general, the law of evidence, and factual inference and proof.” (more…)

Piper Hoffman, one of our latest Spindle Law contributors, is currently building out the employment discrimination section on Spindle Law. As a lawyer at the New York City employment firm of Outten & Golden, Piper spent many years representing plaintiffs in employment law disputes. (more…)