Legal Research on Google Chrome

While most Internet users rely on either Internet Explorer or Firefox to view websites, an alternative that has attracted nearly 5% of the browser market is Google Chrome.  A feature that had distinguished Firefox from Google Chrome was the availability of add-ons to the browser's functionality.  But recently, extensions became available for the Windows and Linux beta (as well as Mac development) versions of Google Chrome.

The Google Chrome extensions website currently includes two extensions specifically aimed at legal researchers.  One will be familiar to some Firefox users: Jureeka.   Jureeka transforms legal citations on webpages into hyperlinks to the documents being cited, as found on various websites such as Justia and Cornell LII.

The other extension is called Google Scholar Legal Content Star Paginator.  Without this extension, cases on Google Scholar display each page number to the left of the line in which the page begins.  By contrast, with the extension, the page number goes immediately prior to the first word of the page.  Of course, careful researchers should check the source material to be sure that the paging is accurate.  Nevertheless, this extension should be appealing to researchers doing initial searches for case law on Google Scholar.  The extension's developer indicates how to integrate star paging on other browsers; but installing it on Google Chrome requires no instruction other than clicking an “Install” button.