You are here because you clicked on the title of a Florida Statute. Titles are grouped organizations of statutes which make rational sense, but are rarely ever used or cited by practitioners. It is much more common to refer to statutes by chapter and section. Chapter 83, Section 59 is Fla. Stat. 83.59. When writing a statute, you should use a style like "from the language of section 83.59, Florida Statutes," to reference these statutes when writing sentences, but all practitioners are picky in different ways.
It unlikely that you clicked here because you wanted to view an entire title, and it could cause me unnecessary server load.
Maybe you did want to see an entire title. To me, on the Florida statute website, the inclusion of the titles were a hinderance to getting at what I really wanted to see. I am going to assume that if you are using these pages, you are likely looking for information quickly and easily. Titles are rarely the best way to get at this, except evidence code, which I am thinking about organizing better on a different site.
I never once clicked on the "Title" link on the Florida Statutes website. Only because I never once clicked on a Title link except on my way to another destination, I will erroneously assume that if you got here, you were clicking around to see what things do. Because of that, I created this little easter egg.
At first, I began indexing the Florida Statutes because I wanted a way that I could personally easily access statutes quickly from my iPad. Before I learned rudamentary PHP, I would hand type in each URL because it was easier to me than using the Florida legislatures website. I then had the idea to pass the statute number to google scholar and began learning the basics of PHP to accomplish this. After I learned the basics, I learned a little more to process a CSV database, and add the function which allows you to directly access the statute with one click when you know the statute number. This is titled, for purposes of common usage, the "search" function even though it is not truely a "database" search. It doesn't search at all, it jumps to where you want to go, hopefully.
This site, like all my webpages, were created in Notepad++ on Windows (with occassional cheats from scripting within Notepad++ upon severe frustration with handwriting HTML) or it was done in vi on Linux. It is built to be compatible as possible with as many browsers as possible, but the buttons look weird in Internet Explorer. It is perfectly viewed in Google Chrome or compatible browsers, which are suggested.
Statute links within the websites are generated during those sed rewrites and php is used for dynamic link generation across all approximately 19,000 individual Florida Statutes that are present on the server. The one click research button takes the variable passed by PHP (as securely as possible) to form a direct link to Google Scholar, which indexes SOME of Florida's most important legal cases, and most Federal and Supreme Court cases which are relevant to the statute you are researching.
That same PHP variable from the statute as before, is passed into a link at the bottom of the statute, so that you can add text or subsection text to your link without retyping the statute number. You can full text search for Florida Cases within this box, and it SHOULD (depending on browser and configuration) pop up the cases in a new window, the same as the one click research button.
Also included at the bottom of each statute is whether or not that same PHP variable matches any lines in the Florida Law enforcement's database (which is also locally hosted, so no data goes out to FDLE) which includes most arrestable offenses. There are known bugs in this process (i.e. Low numbered chapters match many multiple crimes, Entire chapter 16 matches 391.16, 381.16, etc.) but I have noticed through clicking around on random statutes that the database of arrestable crimes is not exactly perfect either. This database is not currently updated automatically, but will be soon.
I have titled this the Florida Poor Man's legal research tool, and it is not perfect, but it is getting better all the time. It is slanted toward instant criminal law information for the state of Florida, but all varieties of case law search functions should work from any statute.
Any suggestions, please e-mail me or even call.
