Court of King's Bench replacing Court of Queen's Bench

[sam-gagnon]

Hello Frank, I've noticed that you've been doing some work on Juris-M in the last little bit, so I thought I'd drop this here for when you have a moment to look at it.

Many Commonwealth jurisdictions have courts named after the monarch. When QE2 died, they got renamed to Court of King's Bench.

This poses a problem for Juris-M. Going forward, new cases with need the vendor neutral cite of "KB", but existing cases will still be refered to as "QB".

Now, I could create a new Court in each relevant subjurisdiction. However, I'm wondering how we should differenciate, on the UI, between the "Old" Court of Queen's Bench, and the "New" Court of King's Bench. I'm proposing to simply add King's Bench and then add a prefix to the UI name of Queen's Bench to make it "--Depreciated-- Court of Queen's Bench" and move it to the bottom of the Court list for each subjuridiction.

What do you think? Do you see a way to keep a single court, with different vendor neutral cites bases on the date decided (which I'm assuming would be VERY complicated to set up on your end) or would it be better to simply have two different court identifiers, and make sure that the prefix identifies which is the current and which is the old one.

Btw: My CanLii Juris-M translator is currently broken for these courts and also needs to work around this, as ALL cases of this court, past and present, are now under the heading of King's Bench, but that's a seperate problem for me to fix later.

[sam-gagnon]

@georgd I'd also love your thoughts on this topic if you have a moment

[georgd]

Hi Samuel,

In my opinion you should go with two different courts. I see this temporal variation in analogy of the regional variation we have in Germany where each state has its constitutional court but they use different names. There too, we went with different court entries.

Also, I think this is the only technically viable method. As I understand it, a decision is invariably tied to either of the two names. So, when automatically processing you'd take the date of the decision into account. This could be done at any time during processing, of course. Going with a generic court, however, means the correct term has to be calculated almost each time it is displayed in JurisM or formatted in Word. If you use different courts you can fix the name upon importing into JurisM.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, you might need to cite a KB decision from the 1940s or a QB one from the 1880s. The mechanics for this calculation could become uncomfortable 😄

As for what to display in JM, there are various possibilities. But I think treating it as you propose makes sense.

[sam-gagnon]

Thanks for your input Georg.

My main concern was related to specifically how I code the CanLII translator (the only translator I could get to work on canadian content). It uses the court name from the breadcrumps at the top of the page to assign the "court" value of the item. Unfortunately, when the Queen passed, CanLII decided to rename the breadcrump to King's Bench for all cases, even historical ones. So right now, my translator is crashing.

I'm going to have to change the translator to get its "court" value from somewhere else in the page. I spoke to CanLII about exposing the court in the metadata, but without a standardised metatag, they weren't able to accomodate.

So I guess I can mark this as resolved. I'll push updates to both the LRR and translator repositories, and hopefully Frank can get to this them when he has the time (after he finishes his list of much more important things, of course).