Some tricky (or for others hopefully not so tricky) conditional structure

startingfromscratch
Hi,

I am currently trying (but failing) to implement a conditional of the following sort:

"If the value of the variable x in a given citation matches the value of the variable x in the preceding citation, do ...".

The backdrop of this is that in German legal studies, court cases are cited immediately after each other without repeating the name of the court (authority) if the court is the same. E.g.:
BVerfG NJW 1988, 2752; 1992, 2409. (And not: BVerfG NJW 1988, 2752; BVerfG NJW 1992, 2409)
Please note that in this example "BVerfG" is the court and "NJW" is the name of the journal in which the judgement is published.

I have tried to implement this conditional by using the ibid or the ibid-with-locator command but it does not work (my guess would be that the commands test more than the value of a single variable, namely title, author etc.).

Thanks in advance for any comments helping me to get out of my misery.
  • qqbb
    Zotero has only limited support for legal citations:
    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/legal_citations

    Maybe Juris-M is better suited for your use case. It's a variant of Zotero with improved legal writing options:
    https://juris-m.github.io/
    https://juris-m.readthedocs.io/
    https://guides.library.harvard.edu/law/juris-m
  • bwiernik
    Yes, for the complexities of legal citation, you should use Jurism. I believe that a German legal scholar has already done the work to support German citations in the modular Jurism styles. https://juris-m.github.io/
  • startingfromscratch
    Thank you very much indeed for these recommendations – juris-m is news to me and I will certainly consider using it in the future.

    However, I am a huge fan of the implementation of the OSCOLA reference style in Zotero and I like to believe that Zotero should work as well for the German legal citation requirements. And indeed, the question I have raised is pretty much the only outstanding issue in this regard – anything else works just fine in Zotero.

    So again, I would very much appreciate any comments providing me with some CSL code indicating a solution to the matter (or is it simply not possible in CSL?).
  • adamsmith
    Chain citations (which only exist in law) are one of the main things Juris-m introduced for legal citation. They can't be done in CSL (CSL is unaware that the author of an immediately preceding citation is identical; it also, e.g., can't do idem citations).

    I think when I code this type of thing for styles in the anglo-saxon tradition in CSL (I created the OSCOLA style, among others), I add the second part of the citation into the history (CSL: references) field, but that's obviously a very inflexible workaround, not a solution.

  • startingfromscratch
    Ah, I see...

    Well, thanks anyway for your comments, you all helped me a great deal!
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