Supporting both kinds of NY attorneys: the pragmatic and the pedantic

If you're not familiar with internal citations in the Consolidated Laws of NY, you're in for a treat:

"except as provided in section ten hundred of this chapter, shall have remained…"

N.Y. Abandoned Prop. Law § 600 (emphasis mine)

I'm speechless. I'll acknowledge, I'm not a great writer, so that's not saying a whole lot. But this is how the law is usually presented. Fastcase ("Beyond Research"), dutifully reproduces it (paywall):

Fastcase also cites a non-existent "2013 Edition" and shows an outdated version of the text. FindLaw is a little better. They manage to hyperlink half of the citation. But it starts publicly available and then takes you to the Westlaw paywall when you click:

Taking it up a notch

I live for programming challenges like this. Here's how I'm showing hyperlinks on N.Y. Abandoned Property Law § 600:

The Pedantic view simply links to the correct place, leaving the text unchanged. It's good for printing out and handing to a judge.

The Pragmatic view, on the other hand, treats this like an actual web page that real humans need to read. It pulls from the database to embed the title of the link destination. There are also a couple more readability improvements.

I achieved this with a computer science technique called recursive descent parsing. Pretty fun stuff.