How-to: Legal dictionary lookup in Firefox

Here’s something that I’d been meaning to figure out for a while now: how do I easily search an online law dictionary from Firefox? I’m already $700 in for this semester’s textbooks, so I’m not going to run out and buy Black’s in hard copy. At the same time, I’ve got a professor who stands by his command that law students need to look up every unfamiliar legal term.

As it turns out, it only took about five minutes of concerted Googling to find a simple shortcut that works on Macs and PCs. Check after the jump for my solution.

I’ve long been using Searchy to make custom search “triggers” that are activated like so: if I go to the address bar in Firefox (having downloaded the generated file from Searchy) and type, say, “w bagism,” I’ll be redirected to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagism. All Searchy does is find the search string (”Metafilter”) in the URL and concatenate it with the base URL (”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/“).

But now that I’ve switched to a Mac, I realize I can no longer create new Searchy shortcuts, because the file the site generates is a Windows registry addition. And because I’m now at a point in my life where I have much more call to look up, say, “bench warrant” than random Beatles references, I knew I had to figure out something new.

This is actually built into Firefox — no plug-ins required!

At that point, I discovered the secret underlying Searchy: to Firefox, all your custom search shortcuts are just bookmarks. Maybe I’m just dense, but Firefox supports this feature out of the box, even if they don’t document it well. At any rate, here’s what to do:

1. Pick your legal dictionary of choice. Black’s is the standard, of course, but it won’t work well for our purposes since using it requires you to be signed in to Westlaw, and Westlast doesn’t redirect to your lookup results after signing in. Same goes for Lexis and whatever dictionary they’ve licensed. Myself, I settled on the FindLaw dictionary for ease of setup.
2. Run a test search in your dictionary. For FindLaw, I searched for “test” and was directed to http://dictionary.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/search.pl?s=test.
3. Okay, now create a new Firefox bookmark. Fill in the Name field with whatever you’d like. In the Location field, paste the URL you got in the last step. Replace your search term (”test,” in my case) with “%s” (minus the quotation marks).
4. In the Keyword field, give your new shortcut a memorable trigger. I used “l” not only for “law,” but also because it’s convenient to type after hitting cmd + L to move your cursor to the address bar in the first place.
5. Hit OK. You’re done!

If everything worked correctly, you can now access your new shortcut by going to the address bar (cmd + L, people!) and typing your shortcut, followed by a space, followed by your search term. Voila!

One bonus I’ve just discovered for we Mac users: if you’re using Quicksilver and have your Firefox bookmarks indexed (I think this is a default setting), typing your trigger in Quicksilver’s first box and hitting enter will give you the “object” box, where you can type a search term and bring up a new tab with your results. Nice! Note that this might rely on having the Web Search plug-in installed, I’m not sure.