Outage

Jureeka had a brief outage this morning, which is now resolved. My apologies for any inconvenience.

It's public!

Jureeka is now out of the "sandbox" at Mozilla and a public Firefox add-on. This means that you don't need to register at the Mozilla site in order to download it.

Tagging legal source material

I thought that I'd make Jureeka a little more fun - and useful - by adding a feature that lets users create tags for legal sources found on the web. The idea is to channel the power of the masses, aka you, to label all of the delicious material that's just sitting out there.

When you're at a page that you want to label, all you need to do is press the "TAG" button on the toolbar. A dialog box will pop up in which you can write your tag:

Once I amass enough tags, I'll work on a search/recommendation feature to give you a new way to forge ahead with your legal research. Maybe I'll even release the data to the programmers out there and have a contest to see who can create the best recommendation engine.

(Note: you can enter multiple tags in the dialog box; you just need to separate them with commas or semicolons.)

The Federal Reporter, volumes 1-281

I just uploaded Jureeka version 1.4, which includes links to around 275 volumes from the Federal Reporter. These volumes cover U.S. federal circuit court cases from 1880 to around 1922.

The cases are hosted at:

• Open Jurist (volumes 1-95) and
• Google Book Search (volumes 96-281)

The cases are in PDF form but both of these sites let you view an HTML version of each case, so Jureeka can work its magic on them.

This material is probably of little interest to John Q. Lawyer, let alone John Q. Public. But I'm compulsive about hyperlinking the legal web - knitting together legal source material from a variety of publishers and making it all accessible by legal citation. Even if few people reach these cases, I like knowing that it's reachable.

And who knows, maybe the authority you're looking for is in there...though I highly doubt it.

Version 1.3

I just uploaded version 1.3, which doesn't have any major new features but corrects a number of small errors and annoyances. Thanks to everyone who reported bugs and contacted me to give feedback.

Contrary to the post below, Jureeka currently does not automatically update itself. You have to come back here (or to Mozilla) periodically to get the most recent version.

Once Jureeka gets out of the "sandbox" at Mozilla -- in other words, when people no longer have to register at Mozilla in order to download it -- automatic updates will be enabled. I'm awaiting word on when it can be released from the sandbox, and I'm hopeful that it will be soon.

Canada!

The new version of Jureeka also inserts hyperlinks to several major Canadian legal sources, including:

• The Constitution Acts (1867 and 1982)
• Supreme Court cases from 1876 to the present (S.C.R. and SCC citations)
• Federal Court cases from 1988 to the present (F.C. citations)
• Consolidated Statutes of Canada
• Consolidated Regulations of Canada

Major props go to the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), whose efforts at liberating and organizing legal source material are exemplary.

Bug reporting

One of the main challenges of maintaining Jureeka is that the source material to which Jureeka points is frequently on the move. Publishers take material down, or change the URLs, and as a result users are sometimes taken to far, lonely corners of the Internet. And because Jureeka leads to several million pages of material, there's just no way for me to check it all on my own.

For this reason, version 1.2 of the toolbar includes a button () that lets users report bugs. (I tried to draw a spider but ended up with a tick.)

Typical bugs include:

• Pages with obscure error messages (note that sometimes this happens because the citation itself is incorrect)
  
• Pages with funny hyperlinks inserted due to some error in Jureeka's citation identifier
• Pages that are legal sources but not the correct one (rare)

So thanks in advance to those who take the time to report bugs, and my apologies in advance for any accidental web travels.

U.S. state cases -- last 10+ years

I just released version 1.1 for download. This version identifies citations to U.S. state cases in the regional reporters, such as A.2d, P.2d, P.3d, N.E.2d, N.W.2d, S.E.2d, and S.W.3d -- from the last decade or so.

The cases themselves were made available courtesy of Fastcase's Public Library of Law and Precydent. Jureeka hunts through these databases in search of the case you're looking for. The exciting thing is that the hunt is dynamic - I don't even know where the case will come from (or if it will be found at all) until the search ends.

Here's a screenshot of version 1.1:

Doing legal research on the internet

Even if you don't have access to subscription legal databases like LexisNexis, Westlaw, or Fastcase, there's still quite a lot of legal source material available on the internet that you can access.

If you're looking for federal case law (Supreme Court and federal circuit courts), I recommend Altlaw and Precydent (in that order). Justia also has a nice Supreme Court collection.

For federal statutes, regulations, and rules, the best choice is Cornell's Legal Information Institute.

State statutes and cases are much more difficult to research, at least in any comprehensive way. Justia and Cornell's LII act as decent portals from which to begin your search for these materials.

Your online research will be greatly enhanced by Jureeka. Jureeka adds hyperlinks to different types of legal citations and allows you to jump directly the cited source material (much of which is on the sites mentioned above), creating a Lexis-like experience (without the subscription fees).

Automatic updates

New in version 0.10: Jureeka! will automatically update itself whenever Firefox starts. This allows me to add new source material and fine tune the extension without you having to return to this page for the latest version.

Another cool feature

For version 0.08, I added a feature to the toolbar that lets you search for legal source material by citation. Might save you a few bucks on your Lexis/Westlaw bills...

What's new in version 0.07

I'm really psyched about version 0.07 for two reasons:

1. It includes a toolbar with two humble buttons. One of the buttons -- labeled "Jureek-it" -- looks for HTML versions of PDF web pages. (Jureeka can only insert hyperlinks on HTML pages.) This means that when you're reading a case online that's in PDF format, you can press Jureek-it and view a version with hyperlinked citations.
2. Jureeka can now insert hyperlinks for every U.S. federal circuit court case since 1950. This is a massive amount of source material that was put on the web by the relentless folks at public.resource.org.
   

Version 0.07 also has more links to international law materials and U.S. federal materials.

What Jureeka! does...

A web page displaying Brown v. Board of Education, before Jureeka...



And after installing it...



Jureeka! converts legal citations that it recognizes into hyperlinks on any web page you visit (except web pages that are .pdf files).