Chronolawgic is a Caselaw Access Project tool for displaying caselaw on a timeline. The timeline format makes caselaw study easier for legal and non-legal researchers alike, and may be especially helpful for those seeking a bigger-picture snapshot of caselaw history.

There are countless ways to use Chronolawgic as an educational resource or even just for fun — check out this legal history of banana peels🍌. Today we're highlighting the journalism use case as an example; for journalists assigned to cover certain topics known as "beats," Chronolawgic timelines may serve as useful overviews of the caselaw that has shaped those topics so far. This resource can better inform journalists' research and reporting, and encourage them to present more caselaw in their work in a way that's approachable for readers.

To kick off these caselaw timelines for beats, here are three example timelines for the education, health, and environment beats. Each timeline includes a non-exhaustive list of landmark cases relating to three major topics within each beat. These are just the beginning — we hope to see users create their own timelines!

1. 📚 Education Beat timeline: 1) affirmative action, 2) students' rights, 3) Title IX protections
2. 💊 Health Beat timeline: 1) reproductive rights, 2) the ACA, 3) tobacco & drug regulations
3. 🌎 Environment Beat timeline: 1) climate change, 2) water, 3) land & wildlife

Let's take a closer look at Chronolawgic's features, demoed with the Education Beat timeline:

The Chonolawgic home page, displaying your collection of timelines.

Timelines can be created from scratch, or pre-populated directly from an H2O casebook.

The timeline content view, with a timeline overview chart on the left.

The timeline overview chart on the left shows how cases and events are spread over time. Travel to any date by clicking on the chart.

The "Download Timeline JSON" button allows for backups of data added to a timeline.

The legend of categories, distinguished by shape and color.

The key symbol button on the top right reveals the legend of categories, which can be assigned to any combination of five shapes and 14 colors.

The module for adding cases to a timeline.

Easily add cases to a timeline by searching CAP's caselaw database, which will automatically fill the fields for case name, citation, decision date, jurisdiction, and court. Alternatively, cases not available in CAP can be added manually.

On the right, there is room to add subtitles and longer descriptions for each case.

Have you built a timeline? We would love to see it! Please get in touch.