citeurl 7.1.5

an extensible tool to process legal citations in text

CiteURL is an extensible tool to process long and shortform legal citations in text and generate links to various websites where you can view the cited language for free. Here's an example of what it can do:

Sample Input

Output

Federal law provides that courts should award prevailing civil rights plaintiffs reasonable attorneys fees, 42 USC § 1988(b), and, by discretion, expert fees, 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, 42 USC § 1988(b), and, by discretion, expert fees, 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.

By default, CiteURL supports Bluebook-style citations to over 130 sources of U.S. law, including:

• 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.

You can also customize CiteURL to support more sources 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 "42 usc 1983" -l -b

Process a court opinion or other text, and output a version where every citation 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 citations to custom sources that CiteURL doesn't even natively support:

cat INPUT_FILE.html | citeurl -a 10 -s YOUR_TEMPLATES.YAML

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