Reconcile citations to statutes

[lmullen]

We have likely found statutory citations in the format 1 Reporter 123. (Are there other forms of statutory citation?) We need a source of data and way to reconcile the statutory citations, parallel to reconciling CAP.

[kfunk074]

There is no open source library for statutes that I’m aware of. The proprietary HeinOnline might be open to collaboration after we can prove concept with CAP.

For now if we just want to compile a database of citations, a couple notes:

• I think I told you to cap the regular expression at 3 digits for the opening term. It would need to be capped at 4 to capture years. Statutory cites commonly take the form 1848 N.Y. Laws 497 (recognize that one?).
• Statutes might include a section indicator in place of or in addition to the page. So the above might also be rendered 1848 N.Y. Laws § 1 or 1848 N.Y. Laws 497 Sec. 1 and the obvious permutations in between.
• If you truly want to be comprehensive you’ll need enough alpha characters to accommodate 1853 Code of Civil Procedure tit. 9 sec. 124. If that sweeps in too much junk to make the game worth the candle, we might need a different approach to sniff out Act, Code, Constitution, Chapter, Title, Article, Section and common abbreviations of the same.

[lmullen]

I think this is going to be sufficiently complicated that I don't want to get bogged down here until we've done the CAP cases.

The approach, I think, would be to write a series of more targeted detectors, one each for the patterns. So I don't want to introduce more noise in the generic detector by modifying it.

I am guess OCRwise that 1848 N.Y. Laws § 1 is just unlikely to appear that often because of §. But 1848 N.Y. Laws 497 Sec. 1 is just number words number words number which will catch a lot of stuff.

[kfunk074]

As the world's premier expert on OCR detection of section symbols, I'd say it does better than you might expect. The trick is usually making sure the regex finder isn't excluding weird characters or treating them as a stop term.

I agree on tabling statutes for now but keeping the issue live to target down the line.