[MLZ] Jurisdiction support

fbennett
Law users might be interested in the arrangements for jurisdiction support in the latest MLZ releases.

Jurisdiction awareness is important both for the organization of research, and for the generation of citations. Given the ultimate aim of gracefully handling legal materials from arbitrary jurisdictions, this requires a worldwide system of identifiers for courts (and eventually other lawmaking bodies). That doesn't yet exist, so I have made a start in the Legal Resource Registry (LRR).

The LRR identifiers are registered in the MLZ client, which uses them to drive menuing and validation. To get a feel for how it works, you can install the MLZ client (use a separate Firefox profile if you are just testing, to avoid touching your main Zotero database). Create a Case item, and type "china" into the Jurisdiction field. You should see something like this.

After selecting a jurisdiction, click on the Court field, and select the pulldown menu with the icon to the right of the field. Selecting a court from a sub-jurisdiction will align the Jurisdiction field to the selected court.

The LRR currently contains only a top-level placeholder for most countries. Where court names are not yet available, court names can be entered as free text; they will receive a yellow highlight, but will work normally in citations.
  • alexanderschuster
    I'm using it.
    One remark: When I type in new courts (i.e. European Court of Human Rights - missing! - or Italian courts), I see that the list of MZL does not memorize them, so every time I have to type it in rather than selecting a previous entry.
    Endnote used to update a list on-the-go and so it is with tags in Zotero. Any way in the future to implement such a function? On the other side, I also see that with a full LLR, this might be no longer needed.

    PS: I'd like to update the Council of Europe jurisdictions, yet there is no XLS file available on the LLR site.
  • fbennett
    edited February 12, 2015
    It could be set up to remember past entries (as Zotero's creator input fields do), but then there would be less incentive for people to complain about missing entries - which it actually valuable as a way of feeding the identifier registry.

    No need for an Excel file: if you post a list of bodies and their parent institutions (or divisions) here, I can add them to the LRR for review.

    (You could also make pull requests directly to the LRR, but that's probably more trouble than it's worth - just post a list of what you think should be in there, and I'll get it on the site.)
  • alexanderschuster
    An urgent addition is
    Council of Europe|European Court of Human Rights

    This has 5 "Sections", i.e. divisions (http://www.echr.coe.int/Pages/home.aspx?p=court/judges&c=fra#newComponent_1346152041442_pointer) and a "Grand Chamber"

    It would also be appropriate to include para-jurisdictional bodies of the Council of Europe that provide opinions/conclusions, that are similar in content and purpose to judgements.
    This are documents comparable to conclusions of the UN Human Rights Committee, so should be treated under jurisdictions the same way...
  • fbennett
    I've added the ECHR and its sections to the LRR, and made a fresh MLZ release that recognizes the new data:

    http://fbennett.github.io/legal-resource-registry/coe.int/index.html

    If anything should be changed or added, just give a shout.
  • Gracile
    edited February 12, 2015
    That's fantastic Frank !
    I think that could be useful to consider the localization of this field. At least for international/regional jurisdiction, such as the Council of Europe or the European Union.
    [edit: actually, I'm sure you've considered this. And it's more a question of official languages than of localization.]
  • fbennett
    edited February 12, 2015
    I just ran an ECHR reference through the CSL Edit view, and ... it came out correctly abbreviated. That was very good to see.

    Multilingual variants of the Jurisdiction and Court fields can be added manually, but I would like to provide variants automatically at some point. That's probably preferable to single-field localization.

    It will be a little tricky to implement - I guess we'll need to add a language suffix like "@fr" to the underlying identifier data in the variant fields, so that the processor and Abbreviation Filter will know what to do with them.

    The other concern is data volume. The data for China includes 4,500 courts, and providing transliterations of all of them by default would double of volume of data that we need to ship with the client. It probably calls for some sort of plugin system for language or jurisdiction modules.
  • Gracile
    (I edited my previous post after yours)
    re : the volume of data : maybe it should be possible to dis|able some jurisdiction in the prefs?
  • fbennett
    The data would still need to be shipped, though. It's not too bad at the moment: the jurisdiction bundle is only 240 kilobytes; but a scalability issue looms on the horizon.
  • alexanderschuster
    Re Jurisdiction European Court of Human Rights, there is a need to add:
    European Court of Human Rights|Grand Chamber
    which is the en banc formation of the Court, very important.

    We also need to add at least the Court of Justice of the EU (which includes all courts, including the "Court of Justice" (without "of the EU"
    So the courts to add to the jurisdiction "European Union" are:

    Court of Justice. First to Tenth Chamber. See: http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/Jo2_7029/
    Also add as formations "Full Court" and "Grand Chamber".

    General Court (Formerly Court of First Instance). Formations:
    Full Court
    Grand Chamber
    Nine Chambers (+ extended composition, which I wouldn't mention): http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/Jo2_7038/)
    Single judge

    Civil Service Tribunal, with three chambers and may sit as "Full court" + single-judge

    A complete list is provided here:
    http://curia.europa.eu/juris/recherche.jsf
    click the button on the right of the field "Formation of the Court" (although a see duplicates)

    I copy the list below, but I don't know whether we should be so detailed...:

    Court of Justice
    Full Court
    President
    Vice-President
    Grand Chamber
    First Chamber
    Second Chamber
    Third Chamber
    Fourth Chamber
    Fifth Chamber
    Sixth Chamber
    Seventh Chamber
    Eighth Chamber
    Ninth Chamber
    Tenth Chamber
    Special chamber provided for in Article 123b of the Rules of Procedure
    Reviewing Chamber

    General Court
    Full Court
    President
    Vice-President
    Judge hearing the application for interim measures
    Single Judge
    Grand Chamber
    Appeal Chamber
    First Chamber
    Second Chamber
    Third Chamber
    Fourth Chamber
    Fifth Chamber
    Sixth Chamber
    Seventh Chamber
    Eighth Chamber
    Ninth Chamber
    First Chamber, Extended Composition
    Second Chamber, Extended Composition
    Third Chamber, Extended Composition
    Fourth Chamber, Extended Composition
    Fifth Chamber, Extended Composition
    Sixth Chamber, Extended Composition
    Seventh Chamber, Extended Composition
    Eighth Chamber, Extended Composition
    Ninth Chamber, Extended Composition

    Civil Service Tribunal
    Full Court
    President
    Judge hearing the application for interim measures
    Single Judge
    First Chamber
    Second Chamber
    Third Chamber

    I hope these can be included for the time being. I hope to contribute soon with the Italian and French judicial authorities.
  • rliivoja
    Having all Australian states and self-governing territories on LRR would be helpful. Here's the list (with official abbreviations in brackets):

    Australian Capital Territory (ACT)
    New South Wales (NSW)
    Northern Territory (NT)
    Queensland (Qld)
    South Australia (SA)
    Tasmania (Tas)
    Victoria (Vic)
    Western Australia (WA)

    Norfolk Island is already on LLR.
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