eyecite — Legal Citation Extractor
Extracts and resolves legal citations (case law, statutes, law journals) from any block of text, built by the Free Law Project.
eyecite
eyecite is an open-source Python library from the Free Law Project (the team behind CourtListener) that finds and parses legal citations in arbitrary text. It recognizes full case citations, short-form citations, id./supra references, statutory citations, and law-journal citations, then resolves them into structured objects you can link and cross-reference. It has been battle-tested extracting citations across tens of millions of U.S. court opinions.
Key features
- Detects full, short-form, supra, and id. citations, plus statutes and law-journal cites
- Resolves ambiguous short citations back to their antecedents
- Annotates source text with markup while preserving original character spans
- Proven at scale on the CourtListener corpus of court opinions
- Pure-Python and pip-installable, with an optional hyperscan backend for speed
A typical call runs get_citations(clean_text(text)) to return structured citation objects ready for downstream linking, analytics, or knowledge-graph building.
Curated mirror of the open-source eyecite (BSD-2-Clause). Get it from the source.