Today’s idea for now is “threaded statutes.”

I do a lot of writing that involves understanding the origins of a statute. If a statute has been around for any length of time (e.g., California’s Code of Civil Procedure hailing back to the late 1800s), it usually has seen its fair share of changes, such as having been renumbered, relettered, codified from an older revised statutes system, amended, etc. All along the way, decisional authority has been written interpreting those various versions of the statute, and secondary source material (e.g., law reviews, treatises) may have been written to explain each or a particular version in further detail. But if you’re a lawyer, and you research, this isn’t really news to you. In fact, in a post by Robert Richards surveying recent literature on law-related information behavior studies, he noted that one study revealed “history tracking” is a behavior unique to the legal profession.

So, in thinking about what would make my life easier as a researcher, I decided I wanted something I’m calling “CALR Threads.” Please note, I’m using “CALR” to refer to any computer-assisted legal research program, whether it’s Westlaw, Lexis, Loislaw, etc.

Ideally, CALR Threads provides me with a time line of a statute, identifies the date each version of that statute came into existence, allows me to read any of those versions, and for each version, links, line-by-line, all of the relevant primary and secondary source material. Simply put, for each sentence of a particular version of a statute, I will be given the universe of relevant interpretative data telling me how it has been applied. I won’t have to query a database for specific language, date limit my search results, perform exhausting legislative research to track amendments down, etc. It’s all threaded for me already.

One of the important aspects to CALR Threads is the emphasis on preserving older secondary source material. CALR systems emphasize, and rightly so, new editions. But Threads recognizes the need to make available and preserve older, out-of-date editions because the analysis, while frozen in time, could still be relevant to your research. I usually have to find these earlier versions in the library stacks, which is a time consuming process, and one I would like to avoid.

To sort of get an idea of what I’m talking about, I want to point out a Threads-like project I stumbled onto years ago. Monica Ortale, a librarian with South Texas College of Law in Houston, Texas, created the online Texas Rules Project. The Project allows you to see every version of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure dating back to 1941, with relevant material from old advisory opinions that used to be printed in the Texas Bar Journal, and a bibliography of law reviews and other secondary sources organized by year. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone writing about or trying to understand Texas civil procedure.