Add "Court Division" to case

[avram]

A new "Court Division"/courtDivision field should be added to case.

Still unclear what to map this to in CSL; Bruce would rather not create a new variable, so is there an existing variable that is sufficiently similar?

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/16476/new-field-for-cases-court-division/

[bdarcus]

Just a thought: but how about the already-existing jurisdiction? It seems entirely appropriate to me, but IANAL.

[bdarcus]

Never got a reply on a my question. Still think it should work.

[gracile-fr]

I don't think that jurisdiction is appropriate but i'm not entirely sure (false friend). Where is csl "jurisdiction" described? As I said on the forum, what about using "section" or "genre"?

[bdarcus]

But I'm pretty sure the division is in the court for the jurisdiction (the governing legal authority) in which a case is heard. Section or genre aren't even close, as they refer to the document. On May 1, 2011 6:02 PM, "gracile-fr" < reply@reply.github.com> wrote:

I don't think that jurisdiction is appropriate but i'm not entirely sure (false friend). Where is csl "jurisdiction" described? As I said on the forum, what about using "section" or "genre"?

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/issues/32#comment_1085268

[gracile-fr]

But I'm pretty sure the division is in the court for the jurisdiction (the governing legal authority) in which a case is heard.

Thanks for the clarification. Almost convinced: I thought jurisdiction would be for different states. E.g.: if I've both US and French legal cases in my db, I'll use jurisdiction to specify this difference and I won't be able to use it again in order to distinguish court division? I don't really know, just want to imagine a clear use case.

[gracile-fr]

Maybe @fbennett could comment that. In MLZ, "jurisdiction" is used as I wrote above but, AFAIR, "Court Division" is treated through institutionnal authors.

[bwiernik]

This looks like we would need the CSLm division variable.

[denismaier]

Can you add the Zotero label as well?

[fbennett]

No objections here, of course, but caution may be in order for extending legal support in mainstream CSL. It's quite a rabbit hole.

The work to automate US citation rules at https://juris-m.github.io/indigobook hasn't made use of that field. In other work, it has seen use in French citations where judicial subdivisions were too numerous to capture in a controlled list. The most essential features for legal support appear to be a controlled list of jurisdictions and their associated courts; a modular system of styles to format references according to local conventions; a deeper field of legal item types; and conditional syntax that enables both match="none" and match="all" in a single statement. Zotero have been very clear that they will not engage with the first. The second is unlikely to be adopted in CSL for reasons of complexity. The third and fourth may eventually find a place in CSL, but without the first two, attempts to code a broad range of materials in a single style will be fragile.

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 6:39 AM Denis Maier notifications@github.com wrote:

Can you add the Zotero label as well?

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/citation-style-language/zotero-bits/issues/32#issuecomment-634956319, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAASMSXK75UCDDLQE2E2VZ3RTWCBXANCNFSM4AQEAAKA .

[bwiernik]

@fbennett How are court divisions designated in current CSLm thinking with the modular styling? As part the jurisdiction array?

If we limit our thinking to styles like mainstream CSL Bluebook or OSCOLA that are designed to only handle one jurisdiction, would a division variable be useful? I don't think that main CSL will (or should) fully incorporate legal citation support, especially not modular. But if CSL contains enough legal fields to enable non-legal scholars to generate accurate or near-accurate simple legal citations, that would be useful. For example, in my employment research, I occasionally cite SCOTUS decisions and EEOC regulations. I don't need to be able to cite all of the references and parallel citations following a case, but being able to get a correct citation to the one decision would be good.

I can imagine aiming to transition to the mulitlingual and legal citation features of CSLm existing as modular supersets of mainstream CSL. If the presence of division in vanilla CSL interferes with CSLm, we would obviously want to avoid that.

Perhaps we could discuss the current CSLm style design approach and how it might relate to vanilla CSL data and styles?

[denismaier]

I can imagine aiming to transition to the mulitlingual and legal citation features of CSLm existing as modular supersets of mainstream CSL.

I don't really have much to say about legal citations in general, but that sounds like an interesting idea. How do you think that should work? Could that be used for other domains with special demands as well?

[fbennett]

No complaints from this end about adding the field to CSL, and it would give you a little more flexibility for some references. I just wanted to flag the difficulties of moving beyond a very narrow set of legal references. To give a flavor, the following are some of the forms encountered in US practice.

US Supreme Court   McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411 U.S. 792 (1973) US Court of Appeals   Mattel, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc., 296 F.3d 894 (9th Cir. 2002) Equal Employment Opportunity Commission   Budnik v. Chertoff, EEOC DOC 0520070154 (2006). Consumer Financial Protection Bureau   Smith v. Jones, CFPB No. 13, 2006 LEXIS 123654 (Apr. 1, 2000) Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission   US Pagoda, Inc., CCH OSHD ¶ 33123 (No. 10-2035, 2011) Student Aid Proceedings, Department of Education   Lincoln Univ., U.S. Dep't of Educ., No. 13-68-SF (Mar. 16, 2015) Department of Agriculture   Arizona Livestock Auction, Inc., 55 Agric Dec. 1121 (U.S.D.A. 1996)

This is completely nuts, of course. These examples each cite an adversarial proceeding (case) using a very small set of metadata elements. The random variety in citation forms is cumbersome and opaque, but reflects the fragmented and stovepiped landscape of U.S. lawyering and administration. It is what it is, and we're stuck with it for the present.

I'm most of the way through the IndigoBook implementation, and I've been surprised to find that most of the forms can be implemented in a single module (so the code could in theory be pasted into a flat style). Caveats, though.

1. The module code runs to 1,245 lines of macro code that relies heavily on extended variables and logic in CSL-M.
2. Discrimination between cite forms depends on a very specific arrangement of field metadata that needs to be communicated to users (hence the IndigoBook+Jurism integration project).

(This is not meant to discourage, and it is not an objection at all. It's just that I have made this journey, and this is what I have found. Given the variety of materials that might come into play on a deep dive into a particular issue, I would only suggest that an explicit line be drawn, and that the precise limitations on scope of coverage in mainstream CSL styles be made clear to users, to avoid misunderstanding.)

[bdarcus]

Nobody really answered my question, from years ago, about "jurisdiction."

Though I'm less confident today that it's relevant. I think at the time I worried about the rabbit hole that Frank notes.

[fbennett]

@bwiernik

How are court divisions designated in current CSLm thinking with the modular styling? As part the jurisdiction array?

It's just an ordinary field. Where courts have a specific set of bureaus or divisions, the format of the Jurism court identifier allows for extensions. The identifers are then expanded into the form appropriate to a citation. This is currently used for:

1. COE European Court of Human Rights (5 sections)
2. EU European Court of Justice (9 chambers)
3. DE Bundesgerichtshof (12 sections of Zivilsenate, 3 sections of Strafsenate)
4. DE Bundesverfassungsgericht (2 sections)
5. DE Bundesverwaltungsgericht (10 sections)
6. FR Cour de Cassation (3 civil chambers, 1 for plenary sessions, and 1 each for criminal, social, commercial chambers)
7. FR Conseil d'Etat (1 section for matters "Contentieux")

[fbennett]

Just a thought: but how about the already-existing jurisdiction? It seems entirely appropriate to me, but IANAL.

Sorry for the long delay in responding. First a bit of background, which may not seem relevant on first reading, but bear with me.

"Jurisdiction" is a slippery term that has a couple of distinct meanings. As "personal jurisdiction" it means the power of the court to bind a particular defendant. Long ago (before 1945), personal jurisdiction in US practice depended on delivering court papers to defendant while physically present in the geographical region covered by the court (its "jurisdiction").

As "subject-matter jurisdiction," the term refers to the power of the court to decide the legal questions raised by a particular case. In US practice, the federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction, and can decide only particular matters that states have ceded to them under the Constitution. Jurisdiction over property and contract issues, for example, is retained by the states, so (ordinarily) a federal court will not have subject-matter jurisdiction over (ordinary) contract disputes or conflicting property claims.

Getting back to the actual question, Jurism uses the jurisdiction field roughly in the first sense of the term. A jurisdiction ID specifies a geographical scope within which one or more courts reside.

Using the jurisdiction field in CSL to store a court division (such as "3e chambre civile" of the French "Cour de Cassation") would use the field in the second sense (of subject-matter jurisdiction, roughly speaking). The problem there would be that you still need some means of storing jurisdiction metadata in the first sense (i.e. that a case is within Oklahoma rather than U.S. federal or California jurisdiction).

To add further difficulty to the mix, the actual string printed in citations to indicate specifics of jurisdiction (i.e. "S.D.N.Y," "D. Mass.," or "9th Cir.") is actually an amalgam of the two concepts (that is, the abbreviations are derived from a union of jurisdiction and court). To manage materials though (as opposed to just outputting citations), the two elements of metadata need to be stored separately in the client.

[bwiernik]

Got it, so we may as well add division. It's used in CSLm (i.e., adding it won't conflict) and provides some flexibility for flat legal citation by scholars in other fields.