citeurl 7.1.2

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 is an extensible tool to process legal citations in text and generate links to sites where you can view the cited language online. By default, it supports Bluebook-style citations to these bodies of law, among others:

• most state and federal court cases
• the U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations
• the U.S. Constitution and all state constitutions
• codified laws for every state and territory except Arkansas, Georgia, Guam, and Puerto Rico

The full list is available here. You can also customize CiteURL to support more bodies of law by writing your own citation templates in YAML format.

If you want to try out CiteURL's citation lookup features without installing anything, you can use Law Search, a JavaScript implementation of CiteURL I maintain on my website.

Installation

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

python -m pip install citeurl

Usage

Look up a single citation and open it directly in a browser:

citeurl -lb "42 usc 1983"

Process a court opinion or other text, and output a version where every citation (long or shortform) is converted into an HTML hyperlink:

citeurl -i INPUT_FILE.html -o OUTPUT_FILE.html

Get a list of the top 10 authorities cited in a text, ordered by the number of citations to each, including sources of law that CiteURL doesn't even natively support:

cat INPUT_FILE.html | citeurl -a 10 -s YOUR_CUSTOM_TEMPLATES.YAML -o OUTPUT_FILE.html

For more options, run citeurl -h.

Besides to the command-line tool, CiteURL can be used in a few other forms:

• a tool to generate embeddable JavaScript so you can make your own instance of Law Search with custom sources of law
• a flexible Python library, albeit one that changes fairly often
• an extension to Python-Markdown
• for Linux users, a GNOME desktop search provider

Credits

Many thanks to these websites, which CiteURL's default templates frequently link to:

• Harvard's Caselaw Access Project - for court cases
• Cornell's Legal Information Institute - for the U.S. Code and many federal rules
• Ballotpedia - for the vast majority of state constitutions
• LawServer.com - for statutes in about a dozen states and territories whose websites don't have a compatible URL scheme