Michigan Law Review

The Michigan Law Review is a student-run legal journal with two primary objectives: publishing exceptional scholarship that contributes to the understanding, application, and evolution of the law; and developing future leaders of the legal profession.

Review

MLR is one of 10 journals that students from the University of Michigan Law School publish.

The piecemeal nature in which the websites were originally created, and the annual changeover of the student boards that were in charge of managing the sites, led to an environment where inconsistencies were rife and important updates were often overlooked.

We were tasked with carrying out various reviews of the site covering technology, security, usability, and design.

Multisite

The research led to a recommendation to rebuild the journal websites on WordPress Multisite thereby providing a simpler, quicker, and more reliable method of maintaining the sites.

The research showed that site owners and users wanted the sites to have a little design differentiation, but more importantly they all should all feel like part of the same family.

Developing the sites using Multisite led to us creating an overarching set of templates that allow for some design differentiation but ultimately provide a consistent experience across all of the sites.

The Michigan Journal of Race and Law homepage demonstrating different styling within the same template.

The Journals

We have developed six out of the 10 journals to date.

Footnotes

A key requirement of the journal site is the display of footnotes pulled over from source documentation. We developed functionality giving site editors the ability to automatically migrate footnotes from MS Word documents into the content management system.