Style Request: Legal bibliography entries in APA 6th

mitchsilverman
I am a lawyer and a law librarian, and while I'm a techie, CSL is beyond me right now--my HTML is rusty, and my XML is nonexistent.

I am back in graduate school, and would really like to be able to use Zotero. The problem is that the "stock" APA 6th citation style (http://www.zotero.org/styles/apa) doesn't handle, for instance, caselaw citations, which I use frequently.

Part of the problem is that legal bibliography entries in APA 6th are completely different from regular ones.

For example:

In APA 6th, the bibliography entry for a book looks like this:

Garner, B. A. (1995). A dictionary of modern legal usage. New York: Oxford University Press.

But the bibliography entry for a case (following the APA 6th's Appendix 7.1, "References to Legal Materials," pp. 216-224, which is based on the Bluebook):

Lessard v. Schmidt, 349 F. Supp. 1078 (E.D. Wis. 1972).

Different fields, different organization--the bibliography entries don't look at all like one another.

So: If anyone out there who's fluent in CSL and would like to fix the CSL APA 6th style so that it works with the legal material citation forms documented in the APA 6th itself--surely I'm not the only APA user who uses legal materials!--I'll spend as much time explaining the legal citation details as necessary. I'll supply examples, enter test cases, check that the various test cases work, et cetera... as necessary.
  • adamsmith
    I'll spend as much time explaining the legal citation details as necessary. I'll supply examples, enter test cases, check that the various test cases work, et cetera... as necessary.
    wonderful. I'll get to this asap and take you up on the offer, I will definitely needs some help, as I don't really understand what is what in a legal citation.
    To start with, could you tell me in your example above, what part corresponds to which entry in the "case" item type of Zotero?

    I should also point you to Frank Bennett's project, which is working on support for legal citation specifically:
    http://citationstylist.org/
  • fbennett
    edited January 22, 2012
    There are a couple of issues in legal citation that may cause headaches in CSL 1.0 and the current version of Zotero, depending on what you will be citing.

    Legal styles like Bluebook/ALWD follow, or at least reflect, the prevalent citation form in the target jurisdiction when citing foreign law. In the US, that becomes an issue if you cite UK legal materials, which have a very different citation form. In the client and styles hosted on CitationStylist, we use an extended version of CSL and splice in a "jurisdiction" field to cope with this. The trick used to splice in the extra variable is not supported in official Zotero, and could break at any time; so if you end up needing a "jurisdiction" field and test in the style, you may need to install the experimental client version on CitationStylist (CS), until similar functionality is introduced by official Zotero.

    Apart from jurisdictions, there is a problem with "public domain" or "media neutral" citation forms, which have been introduced in 16 US states, the UK, and probably several other jurisdictions. While in principle a good thing, the need to generate both neutral and paper-based citations adds a further layer of complexity. The solution I've adopted is to transform the name of the court itself, as the authoring institution, into the "key" using in its neutral citation, using a separate plugin that handles this transformation, plus the 40-plus pages of abbreviations specified by these styles. It works, but can't be used for this purpose in official Zotero, because the offical client version does not have a way of flagging names as belonging to institutions. Again, if "public domain" citations prove to be a problem, you may find that the foundation we're building over on CS provides a workable solution.

    Statutory references are a hornet's nest that I haven't quite yet dug into fully; but I'm pretty confident that the material can largely be handled by the extensions that are already in place.

    If you decide to work with the CS environment, the legal portion of the Bluebook/ALWD style code (which goes by the name "Wisconsin Court Style" on the CS site to avoid pointless turf wars and irritating quibbles over trademark) could be spliced into a copy of the APA style without much trouble; it's written to be self-contained for that very reason.

    The extensions introduced for legal support in the CS project are not a "fork" in the strong sense; I see the work as a practical experiment, intended for eventual merger back into the official product.
  • mitchsilverman
    Mr. Bennett,

    You are (epsilon certain... teleological? considerations) a Great American.

    I am going to make APA 6th Appendix 7.1--References to Legal Materials available to Mr. Smith.

    Mr. Smith, shall we follow Mr. Bennett's lead?

    Mr. Bennett, can I still sync my CS data with the Zotero website?

    Can the three of us collaborate with inserting the CS legal format in the APA CSL file?

    Will Dudley Do-Right get his man? (Well, always!)
  • adamsmith
    edited January 25, 2012
    it depends on what you want to do.
    IMHO for a style like APA, if we can get basic legal citations done that's good enough and that could be done quickly and with basic Zotero/csl 1.0. For that I would still need to know:
    in your example above, what part corresponds to which entry in the "case" item type of Zotero?
    If you want the full details of Frank's legal framework that'll likely take longer and I'm out of that. The full scale/complexity of legal citation is not something I'll touch.
  • mitchsilverman
    adamsmith,

    I have a PDF of a document that explains basic legal citation style. I don't want to post the link; is there some way I can pass you the link without making it openly available?

    Also, here's a link that may help, to a pathfinder about APA 6th legal citation style here at Nova:

    http://nova.campusguides.com/content.php?pid=114919&sid=1021849

    Thanks so much for your help!
  • adamsmith
    Mitch - I send you an private message with my e-mail.
  • adamsmith
    OK, please help me out here:
    "Wienhorst v. Stonebraker, 356 F. Supp. 1078 (E.D. Wis. 1988)."
    So what is what:
    Wiesenhorst v. Stonebraker -> Case Name
    356 -> Docket Number?
    F. Supp. -> Reporter?
    1078 -> Reporter Volume?
    E.D. Wis --> Court?

    Is that right?


    McDougall v. Riggs, No. 88-2109 (3rd Cir. March 8, 1949). aff’d, 727 F.2d 777 (9th Cir. 1992).

    No. 88-2109 --> Docket Number?
    3rd Cir. March 8, 1949 --> History?
    aff’d --> ???
    727 F.2d --> Reporter?
    777 --> Reporter Volume?
  • fbennett
    edited February 2, 2012
    Wiesenhorst v. Stonebraker -> Case NameCase name, yep.

    356 -> Docket Number?Volume of the reporter.

    F. Supp. -> Reporter?Name of the reporter ("Federal Supplement", containing selected cases decided by Federal courts of first instance.)

    1078 -> Reporter Volume?Page number in the printed report.

    E.D. Wis --> Court?Eastern District of Wisconsin -- the Federal subjurisdiction of the deciding court.
  • fbennett
    edited February 2, 2012
    McDougall v. Riggs, No. 88-2109 (3rd Cir. March 8, 1949). aff’d, 727 F.2d 777 (9th Cir. 1992)
    This other sample is actually two separate cites. The first is to an unreported case, cited by docket number, and the second is to the Federal Court of Appeals decision of the same case on appeal (with the name of the case suppressed). Official Zotero can't do this. In MLZ, "suppress author" will suppress the case name when citing a case, so you would enter this as two separate cites in a multiple citation, with "aff'd" (affirmed) as a prefix to the second one.
  • adamsmith
    Thanks Frank - that should allow me to at least to this bare-bones.
  • fbennett
    The "CSL modules" code I've put up on zotero-dev could be used to populate the support to other styles, if you like, when you're done.
  • adamsmith
    That's a good point - I'll take a look at it and see if I can follow.
  • fbennett
    It might be overkill, but it could also be used for single macros from a "library" style of standard macros.
  • mitchsilverman
    Mr. "Smith," Mr. Bennett, thank you so much. I'm sorry I didn't answer your questions, Mr. "Smith"--but Mr. Bennett was on the spot!
  • adamsmith
    quick question - I have a first draft at a style that handles cases. I see that the unpublished court decisions are cited with a full date, while cases in reporters only have a year. In citation data, will cases in reporters ever have a full date? I.e. do I need to distinguish how the date is displayed for those two cases?
  • adamsmith
    I've just pushed an APA style with basic legal support (cases and statutes) to the repository - I figured it's definitely better than the old version, so what's the harm.
    Please let me know how it works.
    Cases should work smoothly. Statues are missing a lot of fields (e.g. the volume of the code), so those may require some more fine-tuning of the data.
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