), which expands all ellipses in the case.
).
- These two features combine to allow restoring the entire case.
Inspired by CALI's eLangdell and Legal Education Commons projects, dismayed by the evisceration of the cases in the latest edition of what had hitherto been my favorite Constitutional Law casebook, and empowered by the release by Public.Resource.org of a repository of United States Supreme Court opinionsfn from volume one of the U.S. Reports forward, free of any licensing restrictions, I decided that the time had come to go all online with my constitutional law courses.
Funded by a research grant from the Georgia State University College of Law, I began the project during the summer of 2008, preparing cases for my Constitutional Law I class to be offered that fall. During the fall, I continued preparing cases for the course even as it was being offered, and began preparing cases for Constitutional Law II, to be offered in spring 2009. Staying about three weeks ahead of my syllabus each semester, by the end of the spring semester I had a virtually complete set of cases for the basic constitutional law courses.fn During the summer of 2009, again funded by a research grant, and while again teaching Constitutional Law II, I continued the project, revisiting cases edited early in the project to conform them to stylistic decisions made later.
Decisions, decisions!
Early on in the project, I was faced with some important decisions. I felt strongly that the editor of the casebook I was abandoning in favor of going online had broken faith with its users; not only were major cases poorly edited, but the use of ellipses within the edited cases was often badly misleading, creating the impression that sentences were contiguous which were in fact paragraphs, if not pages, apart. I determined that my edited cases would not mislead students by such use of ellipses, and so struck on the idea of having the ellipses in the edited cases be expandable, so that students could read, should they desire, what had been edited out. I also decided that citations to precedential U.S. Supreme Court decisions within cases should link to those cases if they were available in my collection of edited cases or, failing that, in the repository of unedited cases (in the possibly vain hope that interested students would follow those links wherever they may lead). It was also important to be able to have more than one version of an edited case, as a single case may be relevant to different courses or to different sections of the same course, and so require several different edited versions.fn
Offering a constitutional law course relying largely on online, edited cases presents challenges different from those encountered when teaching from a casebook. Editorial decisions had to take into account the fact that materials ordinarily present in a casebook (notes, questions, doctrinal summaries, etc.) would not be present in the edited cases.fn So I decided, for example, not to edit out summaries of prior case law in some of the major cases, thus providing the Court's own synthesis of its prior doctrine. I also erred (my students might say too much) on the side of leaving material in rather than editing it out, as online materials are not subject to an artificial page limit. As I next offer these courses, I shall revisit the edited cases with a view to refining my editing.
Features of the edited cases:
), which expands all ellipses in the case.
).
Availability and Licensing
The complete collection of edited cases is now available through CALI's Legal Education Commons website. The text of some of the cases (and, in future, of all new decisions) is obtained from Cornell's Legal Information Institute. Those cases are subject to a Creative Commons 3.0 License, an attribution-noncommercial-share-alike license, which requires that any derivative works be distributed under the same or similar license. Accordingly, the collection of edited cases is placed under the same license terms. This license permits redistribution or modification only of the text of the edited cases; it does not permit redistribution or modification of the scripts which enable the interactive and other features of the edited cases, as to which all rights are reserved.fn Use of those features is permitted only by linking to the cases at the Legal Education Commons website.fn
†Professor of Law, Georgia State University College of Law; member, CALI Board of Directors.
BackWhat p.r.o was unable to provide, Cornell's Legal Information Institute usually made available. The cases from LII are in a format completely different from that of the cases from P.R.O. A script transforms the LII format into the P.R.O format.
BackI also taught First Amendment in spring 2009, but have postponed taking that course online until a later date, being less frustrated with the casebook I use for that course.
BackOne of the more interesting things about the project has been the need for me to program much of this functionality of the edited cases. (Law professors who code are relatively few and far between!)
BackI assigned Erwin Chemerinsky's treatise Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies as a supplement to the course, which largely made up for the absence of casebook material. And my online syllabus has notes, questions, and other "casebook-like" material.
BackParagraph numbering is a feature initially provided by the cases as transformed by Public.Resource.org; it is so useful a feature that I retained it.
BackThis material is "deleted" in the sense that it is not displayed in the browser window; it usually remains in the source.
BackSome decisions about format were made after the project was well underway, and so some re-editing has been required to have all the edited cases conform.
BackThis restriction may be removed in future.
BackEventually, the entire set of edited and unedited cases will be made available for download.