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Better Than Ever: A New Criminal Case Compendium

As many blog readers know, I’ve been offering my free Criminal Case Compendium since 2008. The Compendium is a collection of U.S. Supreme Court, Fourth Circuit & published N.C. criminal law, procedure and evidence case summaries, arranged by subject. Until now, folks have accessed the Compendium online as a massive 900-page PDF, containing over 3,000 case summaries. That worked okay, but we knew we could do better. And we have. My Criminal Case Compendium has just been re-released in a new format: A dynamic web-based version, designed to help you find the law you need even faster. The robust search feature puts real power behind your keyword search, sorting cases by relevancy. And if you like navigating through a table of contents, that’s still there, only amped up a few notches on the “usability scale.”

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Free Legal Research

Now that I have your attention . . . .

Ever wonder what happens to those case summaries that you receive from me by email? (If you’re not getting them you’re not on my listserv; sign up for free here). I sort them by subject and add them to my Criminal Case Compendium, an online, fully searchable resource. The Compendium, now a whopping 514 pages long, turned six years old this month. [Editor’s note: Actually, last month — I was a little slow in getting this post up!] In honor of the Compendium’s birthday, here’s quick primer on using this free legal research tool.

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Better than Lexis?

I am constantly amazed at the innovative work my colleagues are doing. A new and incredibly useful tool — but one that is not widely known — is Jessie Smith’s criminal case compendium, available here. It organizes important criminal cases by category, so you can look at the section on indictments if you have an … Read more