freelawproject / courts-db

A database of courts, tests and other experiments
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Juridiction field missing for bankrupcty and federal courts #78

Open warrenronsiek opened 1 year ago

warrenronsiek commented 1 year ago

Many bankruptcy courts are missing the jurisdiction completely. I'm not sure what the right call is here. They aren't normal courts, so does a e.g. California bankruptcy court have "jurisdiction" in the same sense that a regular court does? Maybe not. However, it is located in California, and its rulings are still binding. I can see it go either way, and I'd like to populate those fields with something.

Similarly, federal courts are missing a jurisdiction field. I'd like them to be something like "FED".

As it stands, if you look at the jurisdiction field, federal courts get lumped into the NULL bucket along with e.g. state-level bankruptcy. That doesn't seem right.

Proposal:

I'm happy to do the work if there is agreement on this point.

mlissner commented 1 year ago

Funny timing, we've been working on this recently, but in a different way, by putting similar sorts of data into CourtListener.

I think for federal data, the jurisdiction field should probably say which states make sense. It should be an array of strings, so if you have the bankruptcy court of eastern CA, the jurisdiction is CA. If you have the bankruptcy appellate panel for the ninth circuit, the jurisdiction is [CA, NV, HI, WA, OR...].