Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure

Reviewed by Caleb Pennington, Assistant Teaching Professor, University of Wisconsin-Superior on 11/10/25

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

This text provides a comprehensive list of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The Table of Contents at the front of the text is organized and easy to understand.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The information in this text is accurate. Most of the text presents the federal rules, so there is little room for scholarly discretion by the authors.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

This version was published in 2013, so some of the Federal Rules have changed since its publication. In particular, the sections on Criminal Forfeiture and Computing and Extending Time are no longer accurate.

Clarity rating: 3

Because this text is merely a presentation of the federal statutes, it contains quite a bit of legal jargon. I think students would struggle to read those pages without detailed context from the instructor.

Consistency rating: 5

The text is very well organized and consistent.

Modularity rating: 5

Following the model set by the rules themselves, the text is organized into 9 modules. Those modules are distinct by subject matter. Within those modules, the text is broken up into anywhere from 4-12 rules.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The text is well organized and corresponds with the table of contents.

Interface rating: 5

I did not experience any issues with the text interface or navigation. It should be noted that there aren't any graphs or images in this text. But the text itself is easy to read and well formatted.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I noticed no grammatical errors in this text.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

Because the text leaves little room for commentary, there is no issue of cultural insensitivity.

I think this is a well-done open source text, though its usefulness may be limited by the subject matter. This text is a published collection of the Rules of Federal Criminal Procedure. As such, it contains almost no commentary or analysis by the authors. These rules are also fairly inaccessible to a lay or undergraduate audience, so an instructor would need to make sure that they are providing the context for each rule that they cover. With that being said, I think this text may be helpful as a supplementary primary source reader. This is the kind of text that can be helpful in a Criminal Procedure class, but not so absolutely necessary that I would assign it as a traditional textbook. As such, an OER resource is the perfect way to provide this information to your class, though an updated version would be preferred.