Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

If only all universities had someone like Jesse Flickinger to explain their research projects to the masses. Flickinger takes his readers on an intellectual adventure that begins in a Kabul café and ends in a library in Missoula. He describes the problem of creating a legal system for emerging nations and how the University of Montana became a home base for the solution: Legal Atlas. “Legal Atlas is a fusion of Wikipedia, Google Maps and tomes of law knowledge offered in a slick interface freely available through the internet,” Flickinger writes. A local company developed the platform and students research and input data into the atlas. It’s an ideal research project for a university. There are hundreds of similar activities going on at schools all over the country. We’d know all about them if they had a better explainer.