Info Citations and hover previews
Citations and hover previews
How links behave, what the colours mean, and how history is flagged.
A link in Hyperlaw is a claim about a citation: this span of text refers to that provision or judgment. The engine records the span, the target and the provenance. The rendering layer then decides how much it can show you without guessing.
The link states
| Appearance | Meaning | What a click does |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary link | The target is loaded and the reference was resolved. | Opens the provision anchor or the case page. |
| External link | The target is not in the corpus, but a CanLII page or another public URL can be derived. | Opens the external page in a new tab. |
| Red dotted span | The engine recognises a case citation but the decision is not loaded. | Stays in place; the tooltip explains that it is not in Hyperlaw yet. |
| Amber dashed link | The provision exists now, but the text in force when the citing judgment was decided is not available. | Opens the current text with a warning card; see below. |
| Plain or muted text | The reference is ambiguous, incomplete or outside the corpus. | Nothing: no guessed target. |
Hover cards
Hover a resolved link to open a preview. A provision card shows the provision head and text, names its instrument and can climb one level to the parent. A case card shows the pinpoint paragraph or printed page. A whole-instrument card lists the provisions or cases it contains. The cards page lazily: scrolling near the bottom appends the next chunk instead of loading a whole Act at once.
- Pin keeps a card open while you read.
- Escape closes the stack.
- On touch, the first tap opens the preview and the second tap follows the link.
- The up arrow on a provision card climbs to the parent heading or whole instrument.
Pinpoints
A citation can carry a pinpoint. Canadian judgments use paragraph anchors such as #para-21; U.S. Reports use printed page anchors such as #page-464; legislation uses the provision path itself. When a link carries a pinpoint, the hover card opens at that paragraph or page and the head of the card names the range.
Ranges are supported (paras 52-55, at 464-465, lists of paragraphs). Later mentions of the same case may be left as plain text when they carry no pinpoint: the first full citation and pinpointed mentions link, bare short forms do not.
State reporter citations
California, New York and Delaware judgments link full state and federal reporter citations (including parallel reporters), and their code-section references resolve through the state code grammars. Reporter abbreviations such as Pen. Code, Welf. & Inst. Code, Code Civ. Proc., CPLR and RPAPL are understood. The state corpus links full citations; short names, id./supra and bare page pins are not emitted yet, so those mentions stay plain text.
Historical text and the amber links
A judgment from 1998 cites the law as it stood in 1998. Where Hyperlaw has a point-in-time snapshot, the link goes to the version in force on the decision date; the link is labelled Superseded version — text as of ….
Where the snapshot is missing, the citation renders as an amber dashed link to the current text. The link is still useful, but its hover card carries a prominent warning: Not the historical text. The card names the reason (point-in-time coverage starts on a given date, the snapshot was never mirrored, or no version is recorded) and, when the publisher's amendment year is known, whether amendments are recorded after the decision. The warning is never hidden in an inline footnote.
The warning does not verify that the text is identical. It only tells you that the historical version could not be produced, so treat the link as a pointer to the current law, not as evidence of what the law was.
Unresolved and wanted references
References to instruments that are not loaded, or that the grammar cannot bind with confidence, stay unresolved. Where a recognisable case citation names a decision the corpus does not hold, the site may mark it with a red dotted wanted span and a CanLII link when a neutral citation makes one derivable. Ingesting the decision upgrades the same span to a real link with no migration.
A judgment often defines a short name for an authority it cites — “2011 Securities Reference”, “the Secession Reference”. Hyperlaw binds such a definition to the decision it was attached to and resolves later mentions of the same short name throughout the document. Where two authorities match a short name equally, or a name was never defined and the context does not identify one authority, the reference stays plain rather than pointing at a guess.
Cited by
Every provision can be viewed from the other direction: cited-by pages rank the cases that cite it by court level and citation frequency, then list each case's paragraph or page pinpoints. These pages are deliberately noindex and excluded from search engines; they quote case text and exist for reading, not for crawling.