Judge first and last names are alphabetized together

[mlissner]

A client has identified two opinions where the judge data is very wrong.

In the first:

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/802753/united-states-v-kevin-snulligan/

The judges are:

• FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Chief Judge
• ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge
• DAVID F. HAMILTON, Circuit Judge

But our judge field shows:

David, Diamond, Easterbrook, Frank, Hamilton, Ilana, Rovner

The second is basically the same:

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/179288/united-states-v-pescatore-chavis/

The judges are:

• JOSEPH M. McLAUGHLIN,
• ROBERT A. KATZMANN,
• PETER W. HALL,

But our judge field shows:

Hall, Joseph, Katzmann, McLAUGHLIN, Peter, Robert

Yikes.

We need to urgently figure out what caused this and how widespread the damage is. Remember that we can look in and restore from our history tables.

[mlissner]

Looks like the second one was sourced from Harvard and scraping. Here's the Harvard source (it's correct): https://cite.case.law/f-appx/400/596/

[mlissner]

I found the main problem in find_all_judges a function called in the Harvard import, suggesting that this may affect a very large number of cases. find_all_judges does some clean up, then splits the words using a regex. At its end, on line 298, it sorts the words of the input, merging together first and last names:

https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener/blob/0fe663de6cdcb13e98abbfa751332e1742addd58/cl/people_db/lookup_utils.py#L265-L299

For example:

In [30]: find_all_judges('Present: JOSEPH M. McLAUGHLIN, ROBERT A. KATZMANN and PETER W. HALL, Circuit Judges.')
Out[30]: ['HALL', 'JOSEPH', 'KATZMANN', 'McLAUGHLIN', 'PETER', 'ROBERT']

Oof. We do have tests for it, but I guess they didn't catch this.

And, unfortunately, that's not all I found tonight. find_all_judges calls wrap_text. I'm not sure what wrap_text is supposed to do, but it says it should "Wrap text to specified length without cutting words", but...it cuts words and I don't see how it wraps text?

In [3]: wrap_text(20, " Hall, Joseph, Katzmann, McLAUGHLIN, Peter, Robert")
Out[3]: ' Hall, Joseph, Katzmann,'

It's used in a couple places we'll need to check and maybe fix, but I still don't know what it's for?

And finally, because I'm on a bit of a sad-roll, I also note that wrap_text lacks tests, even though they'd have probably caught this and would have been easy to write. :(

I think this will affect a lot of Harvard content, so let's see if we can fix it and learn from our mistakes.

[flooie]

@quevon24 can you dive into this asap?

[flooie]

Okay, lets assess the damage.

1. First I dont think this occurred in the regular import (atleast not yet). I tested the code in the harvard opinion import and it correctly extracted the judges.