Upgrade StorageStyle Request: Canadian Uniform Legal Citation (McGill Guide)
Hello,
The Canadian Uniform Legal Citation is the style that is now almost universally used within Canadian law. I have searched to try and find any citation management software which can handle this style and found nothing. Even the librarians at the local law library said that there was no software available to handle this task (actually, her exact words were, "If there was something out there, we'd buy it"). I used Zotero during my undergraduate degree and would love to continue to use it for the rest of my education.
EXISTING CONVERSATION:
There are three places I've found it available/discussed in Zotero.
An old forum thread:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3629/a-canadian-legal-style/
In this thread, (posted in the wrong forum), there is some discussion about creating a new style for Canadian law. Probably most usefully, mlines created a document outlining the differences between the McGill format and the Bluebook format:
http://library.law.uvic.ca/Legal%20citations%20reference%20sheet.doc
There is also an entry in this large, ineffective looking thread filled with scatter-shot requests:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/536/8/what-other-citation-formats-would-you-like-zotero-to-generate/
There are only a few example citations listed in this post; no followup seems to have occurred.
There is also a development style available:
http://www.zotero.org/styles/mcgill-legal/dev
That style, unfortunately, appears to have never been completed; has not been updated since last year, and does not output properly formatted citations.
Because of the age of the previous conversations, I thought it appropriate to try and start a new one.
STYLE DETAILS:
mlines seems to have already done a lot of the work by outlining the differences between a similar style (Bluebook) and the McGill standard in his document:
http://library.law.uvic.ca/Legal%20citations%20reference%20sheet.doc
A reputable style guide can be found here:
http://library.queensu.ca/law/lederman/legalcit.htm
A more concise guide is here:
http://www.douglas.bc.ca/library/legal.html
Unfortunately, an "official" version from McGill is not available online.
If there is any more information that you need to have or would like to have, please let me know. I'm afraid I'm not a developer, so I don't know how much help I can be on the technical end.
And thanks to anyone who made it through all that :) I tried to be thorough; but I think I may've landed in "wordy and boring".
The Canadian Uniform Legal Citation is the style that is now almost universally used within Canadian law. I have searched to try and find any citation management software which can handle this style and found nothing. Even the librarians at the local law library said that there was no software available to handle this task (actually, her exact words were, "If there was something out there, we'd buy it"). I used Zotero during my undergraduate degree and would love to continue to use it for the rest of my education.
EXISTING CONVERSATION:
There are three places I've found it available/discussed in Zotero.
An old forum thread:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3629/a-canadian-legal-style/
In this thread, (posted in the wrong forum), there is some discussion about creating a new style for Canadian law. Probably most usefully, mlines created a document outlining the differences between the McGill format and the Bluebook format:
http://library.law.uvic.ca/Legal%20citations%20reference%20sheet.doc
There is also an entry in this large, ineffective looking thread filled with scatter-shot requests:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/536/8/what-other-citation-formats-would-you-like-zotero-to-generate/
There are only a few example citations listed in this post; no followup seems to have occurred.
There is also a development style available:
http://www.zotero.org/styles/mcgill-legal/dev
That style, unfortunately, appears to have never been completed; has not been updated since last year, and does not output properly formatted citations.
Because of the age of the previous conversations, I thought it appropriate to try and start a new one.
STYLE DETAILS:
mlines seems to have already done a lot of the work by outlining the differences between a similar style (Bluebook) and the McGill standard in his document:
http://library.law.uvic.ca/Legal%20citations%20reference%20sheet.doc
A reputable style guide can be found here:
http://library.queensu.ca/law/lederman/legalcit.htm
A more concise guide is here:
http://www.douglas.bc.ca/library/legal.html
Unfortunately, an "official" version from McGill is not available online.
If there is any more information that you need to have or would like to have, please let me know. I'm afraid I'm not a developer, so I don't know how much help I can be on the technical end.
And thanks to anyone who made it through all that :) I tried to be thorough; but I think I may've landed in "wordy and boring".
I've found with other styles that the response from developers has been very quick and accurate. All they need is for someone to invest the time to propose a set of changes to the Bluebook style (or other similar style - maybe the dev McGill one?) which will bring it to completion (ie a working mcgill style). The more thorough the analysis of differences, the more they will invest their time.
If you can propose those changes, I am sure someone will create it, and I know I would use it for my one law class this semester!
-A
It would be best for someone who uses the McGill style in their own work to take this on. I'll be happy to take a look once we get past this academic term, but I'd need specific guidance (the only legal style I'm fairly familiar with is Bluebook).
A few thoughts further thoughts ...
As adamsmith says, legal citations are a particularly hard case for style authoring. Apart from the fact that the enforcement of style rules is particularly strict where legal materials are concerned, and that the styles themselves (in the case of the Bluebook, anyway) are particularly complex, they also require some facilities that have not been available in CSL or Zotero:
(1) Backreferencing to a note;
(2) Selection of a long or a short cite form, depending on the note distance to the most recent reference to the same source.
(3) Classified bibliography output (tables of cases, tables of statutes, etc.)
(4) In-field formatting (for italicizing *In re*, etc.)
(5) Various missing fields.
(6) Relation-sensitive output (for parallel cites, procedural histories).
Items (1)-(4) will be addressed in CSL 1.0, which will feature in Zotero 2.1.
Re item (5), extending the database schema with additional fields is a slow process, because it must begin with an effort to achieve concensus over changes to the Bibo RDF data model that Zotero draws upon. That requires RDF expertise (or equivalent), plus a law librarian's knowledge of how a broad (and international) range of legal resources is organized and referenced. It's happening, but progress is going to be slow.
Re item (6), relation-sensitive output is needed for even common-or-garden cites to law cases. This is in the Zotero roadmap, and when it arrives, there will be potential to use Z as a tool for professional legal writing.
Looking forward to that time, it might be good to think about what a productive forum or support network for legal styles would look like. We'll have to figure out who has enough of a stake in a solid suite of legal styles to put in the time on refining them -- for various reasons, law students tend to be consumers of support tools, rather than producers, so it may be that someone else will need to be brought to the table.
I just bring it back to life because I started to work on this style in French.
I started to modify Chicago full note style as it seems more complete to me already.
For many items like books, articles and so on, there is just small adjustments to be done.
Chicago seems to me like a fairly complexe style.
I better like the look of what the simple style generator was able to do. However, it could take 2000 lines to have to same result as a more... complexe but effective structure as the Chicago style.
Anyone still working on this?
Do not touch the simple style generator. It's not maintained and produces invalid, basically useless styles + it's possibilities are quite limited.
Oh... so will it affect the work I did up to now?
Cause I put a considerable amount of time already. -_-
I should have been / read more carefully what is going on.
What would you advise me to do now then? I need it pretty soon, but I don't want to start over a few times again. =D
Thanks!
I think I'd recommend upgrading to the beta version of Zotero unless you have upcoming deadlines.
You can automatically convert your style to csl 1.0 (maybe that conversion is even built into Zotero 2.1 - someone help me out here) - find information on the new csl website:
http://citationstyles.org/2010/03/22/citation-style-language-1-0/
There you can also find complete documentation on the new features.
I'd finish the style in csl 1.0, then - just because the old version will not allow you to address many of the features as the thread discusses above.
Interesting!
Humm, I guess I'll continue to work on the types to get it near something decent. I'll try to keep it simple. Then, for the major changes, I might just wait the final release.
More complex problems will be adress later I bet - Parallel citations (and such) for common law.
What I need the most is someone to brief me on/ to explain me the reason of some lines in Chicago style. A 10-30 minutes on skype would probably be enough.
As a matter of fact, there is some lines which I don't understand their functions yet. Some conditions seem to be useless, but I don't want to delete them just in case... so there is a bunch of lines laying around in a very suspucious way. =D
Small update!
I'm completely done with :
- Chapters / Dict / Encyclopedia (All those fall under "chapters" but I script it in a way that it still makes the difference according to the Canadian Guide.)
- Book
- Journal
- Newspaper
- Magazine
- Thesis
- Website
- Case law, it's almost perfect, I just cannot go any further with 2.0 limitations (missing fields: reporter date/year and reporter serie.)
Many changes occurs about "in" and "dir" which are now place according to the guide and which will affect the different presentation of each type.
Objectives:
- Law and bill seems to be a little of a problem, as we miss a few fields.
- Treaties, reports and so on.
By the end of next week, it should be competely done within 2.0 capacities.
Challenge:
My biggest problem/challenge was about spaces. Sometime I used groupe delimiter, sometime suffix and prefix, either with the variables or with the macro... it created tricky situations with double space sometime. Now it seems fine, I tried to uniformize the way to use punctuation and spaces in the script.
Annoyance:
Every international court use different citation style and unfortunatly for us, the Canadian guide will copy those specificities within its style. Which mean... that even if "case law" on a national point of view works like wonder, those international cases, either from European Courts, Interamerican commission or UN are messed up.
I'm really not sure how I'm gonna deal with that.
I guess I got an idea... but it seems it will create a bunch of particularities. -_-
For example...
<if authority="European Union">
...then blabla...
</if>
<if authority="World Trade Organization">
...then... tada tada...
</else-if>
...I'm already annoyed about it, but it should work.
What do you think?
Okay, so here we go:
Standard case law (Federal or provincial court) (1-2)
European Court of Human Rights before 1999 (3)
European Court of Human Rights after 1999 (4)
Interamerican court (5)
Euro Justice Court (6)
International justice court (7)
Permanent justice court (8)
Online decision (by online authority) (9)
1- Title, year authority sequence-number, [report year] volume report (serie) first-page (geographic indication).
2- Title (year), volume report (serie) first-page (geographic indication).
3- Title (year), volume-number report first-page page.
4- Titre, request-number, [year] volume-number, page/paragraph.
5- Titre (year), decision-type number, report decision-number, page/paragraph.
6- Title, decision-number, [report-year] report first-page page.
7- Title, decision-type, [report-year] report first-page page.
8- Title (year), decision-type, report decision-number page.
9- Title (day month year), decision-number, en ligne : authority <adress>.
(I've done 1-2 yet, for national case law. I can see similar aspects with others, but there is a few which drive me crazy. =D)
Does the release of 2.1 and that processor means that within a few hours someone completely new could do the work I did during the few last weeks? =D *feels pain and joy*
Unfortunately, it doesn't have a magic bullet for these citation variants.
Well, I'm sure Zotero can still improove, but allow me to say that this Guide is very archaic and confusing while it introduces specificities where/when it's really not needed.
It's very funny because sometime, many doc type styles are exactly the same. But at the same time, for the same type you have many different styles, like case law. I'm note sure creating more document types would be a good thing. Well, we still miss a few like "international treaties". Still... "case_law1" "case_law2" "case_law3" would make it even more messy. I think there has to be an effort from the Guide itself.
Right now, to be able to create different styles within one single doc type, I need to have empty fields which can be test as "match="none"" to make it possible to style it in a different way. However, that unfortunatly lead to create many additionnal code lines everywhere to test this and that, open something different and again test this and that.
-_-
If anyone comes up with an interesting idea to solve this, I would really love to hear it.
Now, I also wish to thank you for your support once again and the amazing job you do. =)
How frustrating that we have been working on it at the same time. Phillipe, if you want to get in touch through the Zotero message system, I can email you what I have.
I have been coding in CSL 1.0, and have been in touch with Frank through the forums about some problems in the rendering of the results that I believe will be fixed in Zotero 2.1
I built the style essentially from scratch. I applied for an account which would allow me to upload the style to the repository, but heard nothing further.
Same feeling, haha.
Okay, I can send mine too. Thanks! =)
I worked from the Chicago style, but I probably should have started from scratch because I almost completely rebuild it... I guess I just needed a working model to start with.
Okay, so I'll give you my email as well, I'm sure we can collaborate.
I work on the French version, but I guess we can solve many problems together eventually. =)
I'm completely done with those mentionned (book, articles, chapters (and all sub-categories)).
I just found a way to take into consideration 6/9 of the possible mentionned law case (see previous post). I guess we can share some knowledge on that... maybe eventually a skype conversation if you wish. =)
As an international law student, I work mostly with reports, official docs, treaties, conventions, declarations, so I'll quickly move on to this step in the next 2-3 weeks hopefully.
I did not apply for a such account, but I probably should. However, it would be nice if someone would come up to help you on that.
1- R. v. Laliberté, 2001 CSC 35 [2005] 31 C.R. (8) 2 à la p 55 (Sask. C.A.) Juge Lamare [Laliberté].
2- R. v. Laliberté (2001), 31 C.R. (8) 2 à la p 55 (Sask. C.A.) Juge Lamare [Laliberté] en ligne : CSC <www.blabla.com>.
3- European Court of Human Rights before 1999 (1989), 31 Report 2 à la p 55.
4- Interaméricaine Court (2001), 31 Arrêt 72 Report 98 à la p 55.
5- Cour Permanente de justice (2001), 31 Arrêt Report 98 à la p 55.
6- Online decision by online authority (3 avril 2001), 35 à la p 55 [Laliberté] en ligne : CSC <www.blabla.com>.
7- European Court of Human Rights after 1999, 98 [2005] 31 Report 2 à la p 55.
8- European Court of Justice, 98 [2005] Report 2 à la p 55.
9- International Court of Justice, Arrêt [2005] Report 2 à la p 55.
* I use the generic term "report", but of course every report may fith in there depending on the situations.*
***Okay, so to be able to do so, I had to make a bunch of comparatives tables and work around with similarities.
The two most important Court Styles for Canadian users are the 1- and 2-, as this is a complete reference with neutral reference or without neutral ref. The Guide says if you don't have the neutral ref, you have to quote it like 2-. This point creates a condition to obtain a different formating. Than styles 3-4-5-6 derive from one or the other, and 7-8-9 need to use "special" fields to obtain the right datas in the the right order.
For exemple, one has to use "history" field to put the date, so it produces the [ ].
Now, I know it's somewhat going to be a bit of a pain in the ... to fill those information for a regular user. Positives, court 1-2 and can be dealt almost brainless, like books, chapter, articles from newspaper, magazines, journal, thesis, dictionnary and encyclopedia, which are already taken into account in this style.
I'm missing international treaties, which will be done as soon as 1.0 CSL comes out officially, as well as legislation and bill, which are being mixted at the moment.
Gouvernemental documents like reports (from parlement or not) are about to be made.
Same goes with United Nations documents, conference and such.
This Guide is really time consumming... as oppose to many other, it's quite sad that it's being that much "everywhere" in Canada, it really should not be if we consider the way it is made.
I'll upload it on the repositories as soon as I get governmental documentation done.
Comments to make it better? Ideas?
Thanks!
In the repository, search for:
"Manuel canadien de la référence juridique 7e éd. CSL1.0 (Note et bibliographie)"
http://www.zotero.org/styles/mcrj7csl10/dev
Comments and suggestions would be appreciated.
As soon as Zotero 2.2 is realse, I'll finish Treaty and some other document types.
I've built a tool for building style tests, that should be useful for the legal styles.
We have a lot of hard cases, where subtle changes to formatting must be made according to the authority being cited. Many of these cases can be covered with a single item type, on the basis of the fields are present (and not present) in the entry.
There will be cases that cannot be handled with the fields currently mapped in the Zotero "case" and "statute" types, and I suspect that there will be cases where an extra hint (jurisdiction, issuing authority) is needed to get things right.
For the benefit of all legal styles, we need to identify the hard cases, so that we can request changes upstream (in Zotero, in data models behind Zotero). There will be a window with the move toward Zotero 2.2 (or Zotero 3.0 -- the designation hasn't been settled yet), for the inclusion of new fields and for modifications to the data model. If we miss that for important categories of material, using Zotero for legal writing will continue to be problematic for some time to come.
Tests are the quickest way of pinning down what works and what doesn't. They help to prevent breakage for existing use cases when adjustments are made to a style for new categories of material. They are also a valuable reference when it comes to writing user-level documentation.
If you're interested in helping to build test suites for legal styles, please send me a message via zotero.org, and I'll introduce you to the kit.
What I am trying to do is input my citations to check their compliance with this style. Can this be done?
Many thanks!
Any thoughts? Thanks again :)