Repository for a fully open-source constitutional law casebook. Work in progress; currently being cobbled together from a variety of materials from prior courses of mine in a fairly willy-nilly fashion, will be refined over time.
This cases in this collection were collected and edited by me at various times, for various purposes (originally, many were made for a 14th Amendment course taught in Fall 2019, but I then added/am adding more later for broader con law coverage). Generally, my edits are light (in that very little of the content is removed from many of the cases; some are effectively whole cases), but aggressive with respect to quotes and citations. In particular, I've tried to get rid of effectively all citation noise except where I think that seeing them is helpful to the learning process. Also, some of the citations were removed via automated tools written by a highly unprofessional programmer (me), which may have introduced errors. The way I see it, the possibility of minor quote and citation glitches is the tradeoff for not having to pay hundreds of dollars for a professionally copyedited casebook. As I teach with these materials, I expect to catch (and correct) any serious errors, but the material is offered without any warranties whatsoever. Moreover, my edits are unmarked. As such, please do not rely on the text of cases in this reader for the accuracy of citations or quotes within cases.
automated case-fetching functionality depends on my "lawpy" library, which isn't on pypi. I'm just using the code directly from my own hard drive; you can do the same if you download it from the github repo. Also requires a courtlistener API key.
All text in this repository is either written by me, Paul Gowder (notes, exercises, etc.), or edited by me from public domain materials (mostly U.S. government works, i.e., cases, with the occasional long-fallen-into-the-public-domain text like a Frederick Douglass speech or bits of the Federalist Papers). All original text/all my derivative works or whatever the copyright people would call the whole shebang may be used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All code in this repository may be used under the MIT License.