citeurl 4.0.3

an extensible tool to process legal citations in text

Sample Input

Output

Federal law provides that courts should award prevailing civil rights plaintiffs reasonable attorneys fees, see 42 USC § 1988(b), and, by discretion, expert fees, see id. at (c). This is because the importance of civil rights litigation cannot be measured by a damages judgment. See Riverside v. Rivera, 477 U.S. 561 (1986). But Evans v. Jeff D., upheld a settlement where the plaintiffs got everything they wanted, on condition that they waive attorneys fees. 475 U.S. 717 (1986). This ruling lets savvy defendants create a wedge between plaintiffs and their attorneys, discouraging civil rights suits and undermining the court's logic in Riverside, 477 U.S. at 574-78.

Federal law provides that courts should award prevailing civil rights plaintiffs reasonable attorneys fees, see 42 USC § 1988(b), and, by discretion, expert fees, see id. at (c). This is because the importance of civil rights litigation cannot be measured by a damages judgment. See Riverside v. Rivera, 477 U.S. 561 (1986). But Evans v. Jeff D., upheld a settlement where the plaintiffs got everything they wanted, on condition that they waive attorneys fees. 475 U.S. 717 (1986). This ruling lets savvy defendants create a wedge between plaintiffs and their attorneys, discouraging civil rights suits and undermining the court's logic in Riverside, 477 U.S. at 574-78.

CiteURL

CiteURL is an extensible tool to process legal citations in text. It recognizes longform and shortform citations, subsections and pincites, and it can generates links to view them online. It can also create a list of all the authorities cited in a document, in order of how many citation

By default, CiteURL supports citations to U.S. court decisions, the U.S. Code and various other federal materials, plus California statutes. You can find the full list here. But you can also customize it to add support for more bodies of law by writing your own citation schemas in YAML format.

For federal rules, regulations, and statutes, CiteURL's default set of schemas generates links to Cornell's Legal Information Institute. For court cases, it uses Harvard's Caselaw Access Project, though this will likely switch to CourtListener in a future version.

Installation

CiteURL has been tested with Python version 3.9, but earlier versions probably work. Install Python if you don't have it, then run this command:

python -m pip install citeurl

Usage

CiteURL can be used as a command-line tool, a Python library, or an extension to Python-Markdown.

Command Line

The simplest way to use CiteURL is the citeurl command.

To create a hyperlink for each citation in input.html, and save the result as output.html, use a command like this:

citeurl -i input.html -o output.html

Alternatively, on many operating systems you can pipe the output of another command into CiteURL. For instance:

cat input.html | citeurl -o output.html

To return the URL for a single citation instead of processing a block of text, use the -l option. For instance, the following command will print this URL in your terminal:

citeurl -l "42 USC 1983"

To return the top 10 authorities cited in an opinion, use this:

citeurl -i path_to_opinion.html -a 10

To provide a custom set of citation schemas, use the -s option, followed by the path to a YAML file containing one or more schemas. You can specify the -s option multiple times to load multiple files. To prevent loading CiteURL's default schemas, use the -n option.

Python Library

Most of CiteURL's more advanced features are best accessed through the Python library. Here's a quick setup guide:

from citeurl import Citator

citator = Citator()
text = "People can sue the government for violating their rights. 42 U.S.C. § 1983. These lawsuits provide for attorneys fees. Id. at § 1988(b)."
for citation in citator.list_citations(text):
    print(citation.URL)
# https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1983
# https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1988#b

For more information, see the CiteURL documentation.

Markdown Extension

In addition to a command-line tool, CiteURL can be used as a Python-Markdown extension. The extension can simply be loaded as citeurl, and it supports the following options:

• custom_schemas: A list of paths to YAML files containing custom citation schemas. Defaults to none.
• use_defaults: A boolean representing whether CiteURL should load the default schemas. Defaults to True.
• attributes: A dictionary of attributes (other than href) that inserted <a> elements should have. Defaults to {'class': 'citation'}.
• link_detailed_ids: A boolean representing whether to insert links for citations like Id. at 305. Defaults to True.
• link_plain_ids: A boolean representing whether to insert links for citations like Id. Defaults to False.

Note that this extension will slow down Python-Markdown quite a bit, since it requires processing a long list of complicated regexes.