importing judicial decisions

Timderoche
I'm new to Zotero, and my book has a lot of legal citations. I'm specifically having trouble importing legal decisions. If I open a legal decision in Justia and click on the Zotero button, it saves it as a web page, not as a judicial decision.

Any quick ways to do this so that I don't have to go in and fix each one individually? I'm going to have to add a bunch of these. Perhaps there's a better site to access the decisions so that they will be added to Zotero correctly?
  • bwiernik
    Can you give a link to a page that isn’t importing correctly.

    Also, if you are doing legal citation, you may way to consider Jurism, a version of Zotero with much expanded legal citation support: https://juris-m.github.io
  • adamsmith
    That said, on the import end, there just aren't very many sites for which Zotero or jurism import works well. Unfortunately, few legal sites provide information in any structured form.
  • Timderoche
    Okay thanks....Seems like a big opportunity. When Zotero import works, it's a huge time saver.

    Here's an example that didn't work:
    https://law.justia.com/cases/tennessee/supreme-court/1993/851-s-w-2d-139-2.html

  • Timderoche
    I'm also having difficulty with the presentation of the name of the court case. If I put it in the "title" field it presents with quotation marks around it in the note. But if I put the title elsewhere, the reference shows up as blank in my library, so I can't identify it.

    And I can't figure out how to get the court case to appear in italics, as required.
  • adamsmith
    which citation style are you using?
  • Timderoche
    Chicago
  • adamsmith
    And you have it as a Case in Zotero? That would show up without quotation marks in Chicago footnotes (also not in in italics -- Chicago specifies regular font for legal cases, see 14.276)
  • Timderoche
    Oh, thanks....I was conflating two different problems I was having.

    Problem 1: I was trying to cite a number of state constitutions, and it puts quotation marks around the name of the document, if I set it up as a "statute" in Zotero. My current workaround is to put the name of the document in the Code Number field.

    Problem 2: I was looking at comparable book that I thought were in Chicago style, and they used italics. But it looks like I was wrong about that.

    Thank you!
  • FrMatthewLC
    I'm not mainly doing legal scholarship so I won't swtich. (I write on ethics so occssionally I need to cite law.)

    I noticed pulling it up on Google Schoar (then using the Chrome plugin) imported it as case law not a website while othersites (using the Chrome plugin) were just going to import it as a website. The only thing was that it put the docket number in the date and missed the docket number.

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