Version 4.0: Powered by Cornell LII

Jureeka version 4.0 represents a significant milestone: Jureeka is now powered by Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute (LII).

The LII is a not-for-profit organization that believes everyone should be able to read and understand the laws that govern them, without cost. It publishes law online, for free; creates materials that help people understand law; and explores new technologies that make it easier for people to find the law.

These objectives mesh perfectly with Jureeka's, which is to help web users locate free legal source materials by citation with as little effort as possible.

The LII now hosts Jureeka's legal citation redirection service and has assumed primary responsibility for the development and maintenance of the Firefox add-on. This allows Jureeka to reach a wider audience, to have long-term institutional support, and to integrate tightly with the LII's existing web services.

For the time being, I'll remain the primary developer of the Google Chrome version (which will essentially parallel the Firefox version), and I'll assist the LII with future development and testing.

In terms of visible, functional changes to version 4, Jureeka now redirects to specific subsections of the U.S. Code and to specific sections of the Code of Federal Regulations, which is quite helpful. Version 4 also includes an improved toolbar, a number of minor bug fixes, improved citation recognition, and fewer "false positive" linkifications.

Note: Version 4 for Chrome will be released the first week in September (after my move to Cambridge, MA is complete).

New and Improved: Jureeka 3.3

I've been in between consulting contracts for the past couple of weeks, so I've had a fair amount of time to devote to updating Jureeka. I want to describe what's new and improved about it.

But first, I owe a big apology to my user base. Over the last couple of years, my attention has been diverted to other projects (including parenting) and I let maintenance on Jureeka lapse. So...I'm sorry. Hopefully, I can win some of you back.

Legal source material on the web is always changing. Sites go off-line, new sites emerge, and URL schemes change frequently. Jureeka has to keep up with all this change in order to redirect users to the proper legal source. Since I last updated Jureeka, Google Scholar published a massive amount of U.S. case law, and many more state statutes have become accessible.

My recent changes to Jureeka primarily involve: (1) redirecting existing citations to newly published material, (2) adding and refining the recognized citations to cover more material with better precision, and (3) abandoning recognized citations that are not case-specific or that are rarely used. I don't plan to document all of these changes in detail, but I think that Jureeka users will notice a drastic improvement in the add-on's utility. In particular, Jureeka now identifies:

• Federal district court cases,
  
• A slew of state supreme and appellate court cases, and
  
• Section-specific redirects to the statutes of around 35 states.
  

In addition, I've retested and cleaned up the vast majority of the existing links (though I'm still working on this).

I've also spent a bit of time on performance improvements. Adding more recognized citations reduces performance, and I've tried to compensate for this with some minor tweaks in the text parsing. Overall, I'm happy with Jureeka's speed in transforming citations into links. The only time it's an issue is on extremely long pages, such as appropriations bills that run into hundreds of printed pages, where the linking can take up to 30 seconds (during which time there's a slight delay on page scrolling). I've noticed that Jureeka for Chrome is probably five times faster than Jureeka for Firefox (perhaps due to Google's JavaScript optimization).

I also made Jureeka available for Fennec, which is the mobile version of Firefox. However, since I don't have access to Fennec, I don't know how (or even if!) it works. If anyone tries it out, please let me know what you find.

With the 3.3 release, the version numbering is now synchronized between the Firefox and Chrome versions. That means that 3.3 has the same citation coverage in both versions. However, I'm able to release versions immediately for Chrome, whereas for Firefox they have to be reviewed by Mozilla editors and this approval process takes 1-2 weeks. (You can always install the pre-reviewed versions if you dare.)

A note about the Chrome version: The Chrome gallery says that this extension can access all of your files, use your webcam, etc. I would have no idea how to accomplish this even if I wanted to, and I'm not sure which aspects of the code are causing Google's automatic code analyzers to think that this is possible. Jureeka does not collect, store, or even know any information about you or your activities; it no longer even uses a database. At any rate, it's on my to do list to make whatever changes are necessary so that Jureeka is not a (real or apparent) threat to your privacy.

In the new batch of releases, I adopted the KISS philosophy. I want Jureeka to do one thing, and do it well. I eliminated all the half-baked bells and whistles I tried years ago, and kept only the core functionality that makes Jureeka magical: the automatic hyperlinking of legal citations. I am very happy with this decision. I want Jureeka to run silently in the background of your web browsing / legal research experience, connecting you seamlessly with the millions of pages of free material that's online. In short, I want you to forget about Jureeka completely until it pleasantly surprises you by leading you to something that you didn't know you wanted.

Jureeka is not perfect and, given its probabilistic nature, likely never will be. There's still a lot of work to be done but hopefully in its current state you will find it worthwhile.

Before & After

The legal web before installing Jureeka:



And after:



URL: http://neuro.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/95-5207.ZO.html#FN17

Jureeka for Firefox 3.0

While I was at it, I updated the Firefox version of Jureeka. It has improved citation coverage and it corrects some link references that had become outdated.

I also removed the toolbar, which was amateurish and not used sufficiently in order to justify the screen real estate that it was taking up. It had also become somewhat obsolete now that searching for citations on Google generally returns the desired source.

Jureeka for Google Chrome (again)

Google's Chrome browser now has 10-20% of the market share for web browsers. So I thought it was time to get the Jureeka Chrome extension working again.

Version 2.0 is available for installation here.

Firefox 4

It's been a while since I've done any major work on Jureeka, and there are some major plans in the works which I'm not at liberty to announce quite yet. But in the meantime I had to do some housekeeping:

First, I've updated Jureeka for compatibility with Firefox 4. This didn't involve any changes to the citation identifier, but it should resolve the installation issues that folks may have had in the last few weeks.

Second, I've decommissioned the Chrome version of Jureeka. I've received a number of requests to get this working, but I have to temporarily defer it for reasons related to the plans-in-the-works-that-I-can't-discuss-yet.

Thanks to all of you loyal Jureeka users. Improvement is on the way.

Jureeka for Google Chrome

I just created a version of Jureeka for Google's Chrome browser. It's a highly streamlined version of its Firefox counterpart: Jureeka for Chrome doesn't come with the toolbar - only the hyperlinking feature. But in that respect, it's a window into the future of the Firefox version, which I'm in the process of trimming down to its bare essentials.

You can download Jureeka for Chrome here.

OregonLaws.org

Jureeka now links to OregonLaws.org for the Oregon Revised Statutes. The site presents the state's legislation in an elegant, hyperlinked format. It's fast, has a great search facility, and handily outclasses the state legislature's own site.

It's a great example of what can be done to liberate legal information.

How accurate is Jureeka?

Version 1.6 has an accuracy of 81.9%, meaning that for every hyperlink it inserts, there's a roughly 1 in 5 chance that the link won't lead to the cited source. This error rate was unacceptable (to me, and probably to you as well), which is why I've been working on some major tweaks.

Version 1.9 is much more accurate -- it has a success rate of around 92%. It achieves this by ignoring a host of citations to sources (mainly regional reporters in the U.S.) that it knows can't be found.

Ninety-two percent still leaves room for improvement, but at least it's within the bounds of respectability.

Don't like the toolbar?

You can make it go away from Firefox by going to View --> Toolbars and then uncheck "Jureeka toolbar." (Jureeka will still hyperlink citations even if the toolbar is invisible.)


Whenever you want the toolbar to reappear, just go back and recheck it on this menu.

Inaugurating Jureeka version 1.7

In the spirit of national betterment, I updated Jureeka today. The latest version:

• Reduces the number of false positive citations to four of the U.S. regional reporters (N.W.2d, N.E.2d, S.W.2d, S.E.2d);
• Corrects a citation recognition error that confused the first and third editions of the Federal Reporter; and
• Is compatible with Firefox 3.1 beta 2.

You can download the new version here.

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).