Upgrade StorageMLZ Zotero: Uniform (cross-jurisdictional) case citations possible?
Dear Frank and all the community,
I have some trouble with case citations, both in MLZ American Law and MLZ Chicago (full note), to which I switched now. As I have to cite cases from many different jurisdictions and some arbitration awards as well, I would like citations to be more uniform. If possible, I would like case citation to always include:
1. The case name (if available)
2. The docket number (if available)
3. The Reporter(s) with page and volume (if available)
4. The name of the court in paranthesis
5. The date decided (including the exact date)
6. A short abbreviation for the jurisdiction (or the place of arbitration)
I don't really care about the order, as long as it is always the same. Subsequent references should only cite short title and reporter (which works ok)
While I sometimes get the expected result, the citation often misses some of these data, e.g. only giving the year but not the date of the decision, not giving the date at all, lacking the jurisdiction and / or the court name.
Sometimes it helps to create several items in zotero with the same name but with only some of the data above (e.g. only court and date decided in one item, only the reporter in another) and than do a "parallel citation" of these items. However, this is very complicated and still doesn't always give me the result I want.
Is it possible to get uniform case citations with all of the above data independent of the jurisdiction, reporter, court name etc?
As an example, this kind of citation is ok (althout the "[1986]" at the beginning is superflouus):
"German charterer v. Romanian shipowner [1986] Case no III ZR 192/84 (de Bundesgerichtshof [BGH] [Supreme Court], May 15, 1986), (1986) BGHZ 98, 70, [1986] NJW 3027 at 3028"
In contrast, this citation (although it is the same jurisdiction - Germany - and the same court and even reporters) is incomplete, as it lacks both the date of decision and the jurisdiction:
X v. Y, (1994) BGHZ 125, 7, [1994] 47 NJW 1008 (Bundesgerichtshof [BGH] [Supreme Court]).
I know my wish might be contrary to the official style requirements, but especially for a comparative law research it seems more appropriate to uniformly cite cases.
Also: What is the best way to cite cases without official case name? Many European jurisdictions don't publish parties' names, same applies to arbitral awards. But if I don't enter anything in the "Case Name" field, parallel citations don't work correctly.
For now, I resorted to entering "X v. Y" as case name for all such cases, but I would prefer to keep the field empty, so that citations than only refer to docket number of date decided or whatever data is available.
I have some trouble with case citations, both in MLZ American Law and MLZ Chicago (full note), to which I switched now. As I have to cite cases from many different jurisdictions and some arbitration awards as well, I would like citations to be more uniform. If possible, I would like case citation to always include:
1. The case name (if available)
2. The docket number (if available)
3. The Reporter(s) with page and volume (if available)
4. The name of the court in paranthesis
5. The date decided (including the exact date)
6. A short abbreviation for the jurisdiction (or the place of arbitration)
I don't really care about the order, as long as it is always the same. Subsequent references should only cite short title and reporter (which works ok)
While I sometimes get the expected result, the citation often misses some of these data, e.g. only giving the year but not the date of the decision, not giving the date at all, lacking the jurisdiction and / or the court name.
Sometimes it helps to create several items in zotero with the same name but with only some of the data above (e.g. only court and date decided in one item, only the reporter in another) and than do a "parallel citation" of these items. However, this is very complicated and still doesn't always give me the result I want.
Is it possible to get uniform case citations with all of the above data independent of the jurisdiction, reporter, court name etc?
As an example, this kind of citation is ok (althout the "[1986]" at the beginning is superflouus):
"German charterer v. Romanian shipowner [1986] Case no III ZR 192/84 (de Bundesgerichtshof [BGH] [Supreme Court], May 15, 1986), (1986) BGHZ 98, 70, [1986] NJW 3027 at 3028"
In contrast, this citation (although it is the same jurisdiction - Germany - and the same court and even reporters) is incomplete, as it lacks both the date of decision and the jurisdiction:
X v. Y, (1994) BGHZ 125, 7, [1994] 47 NJW 1008 (Bundesgerichtshof [BGH] [Supreme Court]).
I know my wish might be contrary to the official style requirements, but especially for a comparative law research it seems more appropriate to uniformly cite cases.
Also: What is the best way to cite cases without official case name? Many European jurisdictions don't publish parties' names, same applies to arbitral awards. But if I don't enter anything in the "Case Name" field, parallel citations don't work correctly.
For now, I resorted to entering "X v. Y" as case name for all such cases, but I would prefer to keep the field empty, so that citations than only refer to docket number of date decided or whatever data is available.
The no-case-name use case you mention at the end, and the German use cases as well, really should be handled by implementing the cite forms for the specific jurisdictions concerned.
this is the link to the gist: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5749294
yes the square bracket with the abbreviation of the court name [BGH] and the English description [Supreme Court] are part of my item data. I just added these to the Court variable in Zotero. Is there a better way to do this?
As far as I know many international journals and publishers require to add the standard abbreviation of the Court's name and an English name of the court for "foreign" (non US or UK) cases.
See e.g. this guide:http://law.wustl.edu/WUGSLR/CitationManual/countries/germany.pdf
I know that most of the citation guides require citing cases according to the jurisdictions "standard", the problem is that some countries don't really have such standard, the only rule in Germany to my knowledge is that it should be comprehensible and uniform. There is no such thing as a style manual, each publisher and even each author often do their own thing. Especially with regards to question like wether to cite Docket numbers and decision dates if the case is cited to a reporter, there is no strict rule.
Is any of the MLZ styles following the International Citation Manual of Washington University?
http://law.wustl.edu/wugslr/pages.aspx?id=5512
Maybe this is not such a bad guide.
Except that I would like to treat US cases analogously to "foreign" case, e.g. also include U.S. as country abbreviation in the cite.
But if you one day were to follow this national "standard", then you only get correct citations for cases cited to this official reporter. However, many cases are not reported in an official reporter but only in law journals. At the moment I resort to just inserting the law journal as "Reporter" in Zotero. Is there a better way of how to cite cases published in law journals?
Thanks for the item data. I'll work out how it would work and post back. Ping me on this thread if you don't hear anything by the weekend.
We can handle the distinction between official reports and law journal reports in the usual way. The official report form will be used when there is no Reporter value, and the year of the report is provided in the Year as Vol. field. The abbrev for the official report can be derived from the court name. For law journal reports, you are doing the right thing: the report title just goes in the Reporter field.
Another question: MLZ Chicago tends to not include the Place of the court in the case citation unless the citation is not to a reporter but only to the Docket No. and date decided. This is problematic as lower instance courts are organized regionally in many jurisdictions (e.g. Germany, France, Switzerland). A reference naming only the Court's name (e.g. Oberlandesgericht (OLG) for a Higher Regional Court in Germany) is therefore incomplete. The Refence should always include the Place. E.g. "Oberlandesgericht Munich" or "Cour d'Appel (CA) Paris", to give a French example.
Can it be arranged that places are included in the citation also when the citation is to a reporter?
Maybe the code should rather always produce a citation including the place of the court, unless none is provided.
For top-level courts, where a citation wouldn't ordinarily include the place, the user should just leave the field blank (which I think would be the natural thing to do).
1. "X v. Y [1993] Case no 23 U 1262/93 (Ger. Kammergericht [KG] [Higher Regional Court], Berlin, November 22, 1993), [1994] 5 DtZ 177 179."
It refers to a decision of a higher regional court in Berlin published in a periodical (not an official reporter). Except for the superflous year of decision "[1993]" in the beginning, the citation looks fine. However, I only arrive at this result using the "parallel citation" method described above. If I ordinarily cite the case item including all required data (including jurisdiction, court, place, date, docket number) I would only get this:
"X v. Y, [1994] 5 DtZ 177 (Kammergericht [KG] [Higher Regional Court]) 179."
This obviously misses the place and date of decision. It also misses the docket number, although this might - I agree - not entirely necessary if there is a periodical. Nevertheless, especially if parties are unknown like in this case, the docket number is useful.
2. "X v. Y [1992] Case no 100 O 168/92, [1993] 4 DtZ 91"
This is another example citation, which is even more incomplete, although the zotero items contain exact same kind of data as for the case above. The only difference is, that this refers to an even lower court (Landgericht Berlin, a regional court). I do not understand why this citation does not even include the court's name, like in the first example, let alone all the other missing information.
The output will be incorrect until proper support for German citation forms is added to the style. Until then, the style will fall back to US citation forms, which will of course be incorrect.
The "court" or "place" information should not be omitted from the record, since some styles will require it. That information can be suppressed citations, either in the style itself, or via the Abbreviation Filter.
I'll work on this this weekend.