Friday, September 19, 2008

Canada!

The new version of Jureeka also inserts hyperlinks to several major Canadian legal sources, including:
  • The Constitution Acts (1867 and 1982)
  • Supreme Court cases from 1876 to the present (S.C.R. and SCC citations)
  • Federal Court cases from 1988 to the present (F.C. citations)
  • Consolidated Statutes of Canada
  • Consolidated Regulations of Canada
Major props go to the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), whose efforts at liberating and organizing legal source material are exemplary.

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.

Monday, September 15, 2008

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: