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).