Jureeka! – “Find by Citation” Toolbar for the Internet

Doing legal research using free Internet websites? Jureeka!, a Firefox Add-on, may help:

1. Type a citation into the toolbar and the case is returned if a free version is available on the web. (but see caveats, below)

2. On web documents, Jureeka looks for legal citations and links them to free web copies of the case, statute, etc. It can convert pdf documents to html to enable link creation.

Jureeka has good coverage of federal sources, including cases, U.S. Code sections, public laws and regulations. See Jureeka source coverage spreadsheet . The service does not cover Ohio Appellate cases, and only covers Ohio Supreme Court cases from 1992. Ohio WebCites (ex. 2008-Ohio-2189) work but Ohio Official Citations, such as Ohio St.3d and N.E.2d do not.

The toolbar works for Ohio Revised Code and Ohio Administrative Code sections. Use the following formats: ohio rev. code 2901.01; ohio admin. code 109:4-3-01.

On some webpages, Jureeka does more harm than good by inserting a link to N.E. regional reporters. These links basically go nowhere. The webpage may contain a working link to an Ohio WebCite, but the reader is distracted by nonworking N.E. reporter links. For an example, look at Ohio Constitution – Court Decisions after installing Jureeka.

Jureeka is improving all the time, so these problems may go away. See Jureeka blog. The current version is 82% accurate. There is a new version “in the sandbox” which is 92% accurate. The new version ignores regional reporters which it knows can not be found.

Source: Steven M. Cohen, Better Browsing, Information Today, 1/30/09 and LawLibTech blog. Also thanks to Wisblawg.