[mlz] Some peculiarities in mlz-amlaw.csl

mlwang
Hi,

As I continue to work on my "MLZ Taiwan Law Style", I've run into some peculiarities in mlz-amlw.csl on which I hope someone could shed some light. Thanks.

1. "The New York Times" is abbreviated as "The N.Y. Times" (after importing both the Abbr and Hints lists). Shouldn't the leading "the" be omitted? Is there a way to tell the style processor to omit all leading "the"?

2. "September" is abbreviated as "Sep.", not "Sept." I thought the latter is more common, wrong?

3. The "medium" field for an interview is not properly handled (doesn't show up in citation). Upon closer look, I guess the following block of code is the culprit (line 494-96):

<if match="all" variable="genre interviewer">
<text text-case="title" variable="genre"/>
</if>

I guess the two instances of "genre" should be changed to "medium".

4. Inside the associated abbreviation list (mlz-amlaw-names.json), there are two sections with entries for abbreviated US federal circuit court names: "us - institution-part" & "us;federal - institution-part". The entries are not identical, however. Under "us - institution-part", we have:

"Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit": "8th Cir.",
"Second Circuit Court of Appeals": "2d Cir.",

Under "us;federal - institution-part", there are:

"Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals": "8th Cir.",
"Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals": "11th Cir.",
"Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals": "5th Cir.",
"First Circuit Court of Appeals": "1st Cir.",
"Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals": "4th Cir.",
"Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals": "9th Cir.",
"Second Circuit Court of Appeals": "2nd Cir.",
"Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals": "7th Cir.",
"Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals": "6th Cir.",
"Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals": "10th Cir.",
"Third Circuit Court of Appeals": "3rd Cir."

Neither has the full list, and the abbreviations for the 2nd circuit are different. There is also an entry for district courts under "us;federal - institution-part":

"District Court": "!here>>>",

which I don't quite understand.

I've amended both with a complete list of all federal circuit courts with numerous common variations, but I don't know how to contribute the amendments back.

5. mlz-amlaw.csl omits the "XML declaration" at the start of the file. Is that intentional? That doesn't prevent it from working properly, but my editor (Sublime Text) doesn't color code the file without the line.
  • fbennett
    I mentioned in mail that I was getting an error loading the American Law style under Firefox 24. It was showing as a recursion error, and turned out to be due to a poorly written processor build function. After a rewrite today it's now working fine in FF 24; if you ran into that snag, updating the MLZ client should clear it.
    1. "The New York Times" is abbreviated as "The N.Y. Times" (after importing both the Abbr and Hints lists). Shouldn't the leading "the" be omitted? Is there a way to tell the style processor to omit all leading "the"?
    You can either fix the title in the item directly, or register an abbreviation of "The New York Times" to the correct form.
    2. "September" is abbreviated as "Sep.", not "Sept." I thought the latter is more common, wrong?
    Thanks for catching this: the Bluebook has "Sept." I've fixed the term in the style.
    3. The "medium" field for an interview is not properly handled (doesn't show up in citation).
    There isn't a field on the Letter type that maps to CSL "medium". The Type field maps to "genre", and can be used for things like "Letter on parchment" or "Microfiche of letter".
    4. Inside the associated abbreviation list (mlz-amlaw-names.json), there are two sections with entries for abbreviated US federal circuit court names....
    The handling of court names is a work in progress. The cleanest approach is to specify the court in the Jurisdiction field, and I've been expanding the pool of searchable items by degrees. In the latest release the US Federal circuit courts of appeal and bankruptcy appellate panels are covered, as well as bankruptcy courts at the district level.

    The list of jurisdiction codes is nowhere complete yet, but if there is anything you'd like to see added (for the US, Taiwan, or any other jurisdiction), just let me know. The list is in a GitHub repo, feel free to fork it and submit pull requests. Any additions will feed through on the next MLZ release.
  • fbennett
    Re this form in the abbreviation lists:
    "District Court": "!here>>>"
    The "here" refers to the field containing the left-hand value, so it comes out to mean "suppress this entry completely". It's a hacked extension of the syntax described at p. 37 of the book.
    5. mlz-amlaw.csl omits the "XML declaration" at the start of the file. Is that intentional? That doesn't prevent it from working properly, but my editor (Sublime Text) doesn't color code the file without the line.
    It's just an oversight on my part, sorry for the inconvenience. I'll add it to the style files soon.
  • mlwang
    There isn't a field on the Letter type that maps to CSL "medium". The Type field maps to "genre", and can be used for things like "Letter on parchment" or "Microfiche of letter".
    I guess we're talking different types of items here. I was talking about the "Interview" type, not Letter. There is not a field for "genre" for this type of items.

    Thanks for the other comments. I'll have to learn how to work with Github some other day.
  • fbennett
    Oops. Of course. I've adjusted things to make use of Medium and smoothed out the formatting a little. If you enter "telephone" in the field, you'll get something like "Telephone interview by Jack Jones with Bob Brown".
  • mlwang
    Caught a regression with the new mlz-amlaw.csl (2013-10-12T16:55:37.761722 version):

    In bibliography, many items are now missing their title. I guess (without getting to the bottom of it) it's because the new "amlaw-title" macro test for a cite's position extensively.

    Two other things I forgot to mention that's still there with the newest version: newspaper articles are rendered with common phrases in their title abbreviated and jurisdiction parenthesis behind dates, set off with a comma. Are they intended behavior? See, e.g. (emphasis added):

    Richard H. Thaler, Fin. Literacy, Beyond the Classroom, The N.Y. Times, Oct. 5, 2013, (U.S.), http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/financial-literacy-beyond-the-classroom.html.

    I'm asking because they are different from Bluebook rules, but I know mlz-amlw follows Wisconsin Court of Appeals rules, not the bluebook, so perhaps they are intended.

    Saw the new "condition(s)" elements inside "if/else-if/else", by the way. Great additions! Thanks!
  • fbennett
    Wisconsin court rules just point to the Bluebook, so the requirements are the same. That abbrev in the newspaper title shouldn't be happening, I'll see if I can reproduce that tomorrow sometime. The "(U.S.)" in the cite suggests that the Jurisdiction field for that cite has a value. You should be able to blank the field in the record, and it will go away.

    Can you export a few records that come up without titles in the bib, and save them as a public gist on http://gist.github.com? If you post the gist URL back here, I'll take a look.
  • fbennett
    On the missing titles issue, there's no need for a sample: I was able to reproduce this easily. As you suspected, it's due to the position tests. When consolidating the conditions for title rendering, I forgot that position="first" is always false in the bibliography section:

    http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#choose

    With the cause known, fixing up the style will be straightforward. Thanks for raising a flag on this.
  • fbennett
    Fixed. After reinstalling the style, titles should appear correctly in the bibliography.
  • fbennett
    newspaper articles are rendered with common phrases in their title abbreviated and jurisdiction parenthesis behind dates, set off with a comma. Are they intended behavior? See, e.g. (emphasis added):

    Richard H. Thaler, Fin. Literacy, Beyond the Classroom, The N.Y. Times, Oct. 5, 2013, (U.S.), http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/financial-literacy-beyond-the-classroom.html.
    I haven't tested, but the value in the Jurisdiction field and the abbreviation are likely related. The way it's coded currently, if there is no Jurisdiction value, abbreviation hints will not be applied. It a value is present, they are.

    The Jurisdiction value on Newspaper Article is for cases reported in newspapers. (For the new Japanese legal style, I added the field to Journal Article yesterday as well, for case comments.)
  • mlwang
    Fixed. After reinstalling the style, titles should appear correctly in the bibliography.
    Confirmed. Thanks.
    I haven't tested, but the value in the Jurisdiction field and the abbreviation are likely related. The way it's coded currently, if there is no Jurisdiction value, abbreviation hints will not be applied. It a value is present, they are.
    Git it. Indeed the title is rendered properly when the jurisdiction field is emptied. The value is auto-filled, however, when capturing from the N.Y. Times website. Must find time to learn the syntax of site translators, then.
    Wisconsin court rules just point to the Bluebook, so the requirements are the same.
    Ah, so! Good. I'll report back if I find further discrepancies, then. There are a few at the back of my mind, but I have to dig them out and re-test first.
  • fbennett
    The value is auto-filled, however, when capturing from the N.Y. Times website.
    Ah, my fault. It was forcing the jurisdiction value when translating newspaper article items. I've just put up a fresh MLZ release that fixes it.
  • mlwang
    Confirmed. Thanks!
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