citeurl 4.3.0

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 the following 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 schemas in YAML format.

In addition to longform citations, CiteURL can recognize subsequent shortform citations that appear. And in addition to generating hyperlinks, it can tally up all of the times that a text cites a particular authority.

If you want to try out the citation lookup features without installing anything, you can use LawSearch, 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. Install Python if you don't have it, then run this command:

python -m pip install citeurl

Usage

CiteURL provides a command-line tool called citeurl. You can pass text to CiteURL by opening a file with the -i option, or by piping text to the program, e.g. with cat file.html | citeurl.

By default, CiteURL uses its built-in schemas to insert hyperlinks into the text, and outputs the result to stdout. You can redirect the output to a file with the -o option, or open the result in a browser with -b.

To look up a single citation instead of processing a text, use citeurl -l <citation>.

For more options, run citeurl -h.

Besides the command line tool, CiteURL can be loaded as a Python library or as an extension to Python-Markdown. Additionally, Linux users with the GNOME shell can install CiteURL as a search provider available directly from their desktop. More documentation is available here.

Credits

Many thanks to these websites, which CiteURL's default schemas 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