As a research assistant, I find myself reading an insane amount of law review articles. Adding Law Review to the mix means that I’ll be reading a super insane number of law review articles next year.

I always read these articles and notice that they’ve been written in a nice outline format, but Lexis doesn’t give you any kind of table of contents to quickly analyze the argument structure. Reading all of the headings can usually give you some idea of whether the article is going to be of any use, so why not have these headings given up front? LexisNexis, I’m looking at you.

Anyway, I got tired of waiting for this feature, so I decided to write some python code to do it.

OS X / Linux people, you’re stuck downloading python and running python code linked above. If you need any assistance, feel free to ask.

Windows people, you need to download and install python, and then download and install my program. After you install python, the outliner will run from your Start Menu or Desktop like any other program you’ve ever downloaded.

It’s real simple to use. Cut and paste everything from the Text Section of the law review article, and then press “Outline.” I’ve run it on about 20 articles so far without a problem. If you find any bugs, feel free to let me know. My intention was simply to make it functional (rather than polished) for a basic understanding of the argument layout.

Cheers!

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