Working with civil law jurisdictions (Italy, France, Spain, Germany, etc.)

alexanderschuster
Dear all,

a few discussions focussed on civil law systems and the solutions for a proper citation:
188BET靠谱吗Netherlands: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/35361/leidraad-voor-juridische-auteurs-dutch-v11/#Item_0
188BET靠谱吗France: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/9823/french-law-cases-droit-francais-decisions-arrets-jugements/#Item_0
188BET靠谱吗Germany: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/20886/citation-style-for-german-lawyers/
188BET靠谱吗Italy: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/4362/italian-legal-style/#Item_0 [no substantial discussion there, though]

And there are other threads, of course, also outside the MLZ or law sections/tags.

188BET靠谱吗I've been keeping an eye on MLZ for the past few years, convinced that I should move from Endnote (with tons of personal adaptions to multilingual legal work and citation) to the Zotero family.However, I still have a few questions and one suggestion.

188BET靠谱吗1) To my great surprise, there have been great leaps forward in the regular Zotero community when it comes to citing law, especially German law.What is the experience with this styles?Can German case law be formatted seamlessly according to different styles?

188BET靠谱吗Should someone insert data with MLZ, would you say that the database with MLZ-specific fields causes troubles if used with Zotero and its legal styles?188BET靠谱吗I am more that willing to invest in MLZ, but I fear that some time in the future, when Zotero includes some elements needed for handling legal data, there is a compatibility issue?188BET靠谱吗I know Zotero can formally read MLZ database, my question concerns fields, styles, etc.

188BET靠谱吗2) I would be more than willing to hear individual experiences in using latest Zotero versions or MLZ for advanced legal citation.The French solutions discussed in the threads above seem to me to be not a sustainable solution, i.e.they are non-standard, exactly as my Endnote experience, with field (mis-)used to get to the result I want.

3) I will look at the answers above, but I feel there is a need to build a working and discussion group focussing on civil law systems.French, Spanish, Italian and German have a common approach in many situations and I believe common problems call for common solutions.

I am familiar with the Italian, French and more passively than actively with the German legal citation styles.188BET靠谱吗I would be more that happy to develop guidelines on how to use MLZ or Zotero for civil law materials.It still seems to me that there is a wealth of solutions and options for common law systems, but trail to blaze for continental European legal traditions.

I should also add that I work in the field of comparative law and very often I happen to cite the same judgement or statute in different languages, which is why I value MLZ.This goes also for citing EU legal sources.

Thanks for insights and comments.
Alexander
  • zuphilip
    188BET靠谱吗You may find some answers for German law and Zotero on this blog post.
  • fbennett
    Well, this is timely.188BET靠谱吗I released a major upgrade to MLZ a few minutes ago (4.0.21m487 - despite the lagging version number, it's even with current Zotero 4.0).

    The new version migrates to a new, more orderly, more future-proof system of jurisdiction and court identifiers, which is maintained here:

    http://fbennett.github.io/legal-resource-registry/

    To get full value from the identifiers, I've completely rewritten the MLZ user interface code for the right-side panel.188BET靠谱吗The previous code was written before I fully understood how the Zotero UI operated, and that showed through in quirks and bugs.The new interface is less intrusive at the code level, and working with it should be a much better experience for everyone (including me!).

    The identifiers allow us to validate jurisdictions and courts (and eventually legislative and administrative bodies).The interface allows handwritten entries, but these are highlighted as a reminder that they are not (yet) known to the identifier system.As the identifier system grows in strength, collaboration and style development should get easier, with fewer distracting surprises between drafting and publication.

    There is one more thing to put in place to ready MLZ for the mainstream.CSL styles are currently cast as single files.This does not work out very well for law, where formatting needs to be tweaked according to jurisdiction, of which there are, well, many.If the citation processor can be extended to support modular legal support, users and developers in individual jurisdictions can concentrate on the finite, manageable task of style design for their legal system, without worrying about collateral demands of a bloated mass of unrelated style code.

    It would be wonderful to have more feedback on MLZ and the CSL-m styles.188BET靠谱吗I've been sorely distracted with the groundwork development work until now, but when modular legal style support is done (maybe this summer?), and after we have run the rapids with the Zotero async migration, I should have more time to help with support and promotion.

    On your specific concerns about compatibility, it is certainly possible to run official CSL styles in MLZ, but formatting will not translate seamlessly.

    As for which platform to prefer, it's a judgment call, and perhaps a matter of taste.188BET靠谱吗The Zotero developers are occupied full time with the main client, and do not offer support for MLZ.188BET靠谱吗We do hope to migrate some or all of the MLZ functionality to official Zotero at some stage.This would be ideal, but it will require a lot of work (my coding skills are not the best, there is a lot of my code in there, at every line would need to be reviewed).The prospects of a merger would be much improved if it were to attract significant funding from interested institutions, so that might be something to keep in mind.

    That's pretty much the story for the present - sorry that I can't offer more than "watch this space" at the moment, but I do think a proper solution to the legal conundrum is in the offing.
  • alexanderschuster
    @zuphilip:
    I read the blog.188BET靠谱吗The author focuses on the use of Zotero with legal literature, but says little about how he manages to exploit it to fruitfully cite German case-law.This is the real problem when it comes to applying it to civil law.

    @fbennett:
    Why not relying on the ECLI identifiers for the 28 EU Member State jurisdictions?It would also guarantee their regular update by means - perhaps - of importation.
  • Gracile
    The French solutions discussed in the threads above seem to me to be not a sustainable solution, i.e.they are non-standard, exactly as my Endnote experience, with field (mis-)used to get to the result I want.
    I am not sure what are you exactly referring to, but, as the one who starts the French law thread (5 years ago… a lot of progress have been made thanks to Frank's commitment), I can say that I've never really used the parallel citation solution.

    At the moment, the main issue, for me, is (still) not related to legal materials alone (laws, cases, etc.) but to scholar comments of those, or to the relationships between them (e.g.Advocate General's Opinion in a specific case in EU law).Five years ago, I had some hope with a future "hierarchical data model" but, now, I know that's a very distant goal…

    Frank, I've discovered your legal resource registry three days ago and will contribute to it (btw, "France" is in both (stripes and yellow) lists at the moment).
  • fbennett
    edited February 9, 2015
    @alexanderschuster: Leveraging the ECLI identifiers would be the right thing to do.If they cover courts down to the trial level it will be particularly nice.Is there a place where I can acquire the full set of institutional identifiers?

    @Gracile: When I get modular legal style support in place, we'll be able to work intensively on particular jurisdictions.The current parallel citation solution is pretty unhappy, based on fragile heuristics.I'd like to do better.Modular styles should be a watershed - at the moment, it's hard to concentrate fully on the requirements of a single jurisdiction or class of jurisdictions, because every potential solution attracts a flood of "what-ifs" (in my thinking, at least).Isolating the targets should help us to focus.
  • Gracile
    edited February 8, 2015
    @Frank: https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_european_case_law_identifier_ecli-175-en.do(click on the flags in the right column for specific information on the implementation of ECLI in the different member states).
    Stéphane Cottin 188BET靠谱吗(zotero page)is an expert on these questions, I think [ http://twitter.com/cottinstef]

    ECLI is only for cases, as far as I know, but there's also URN:LEX which has a broader scope (IIRC you're aware of that)
  • fbennett
    Yeah, I looked at the ECLI site awhile ago, and it seemed to contain only rough text descriptions of each jurisdiction.Looking more closely, I see that identifier lists have been provided (in text form) by France, the Netherlands, Finland, and Slovenia.The others all report only the nation code, which is already in the LRR.I'll keep an eye on this!if you come across further developments, give me a shout.

    We can handle the ECLI codes in the LRRin the same way as the Free Law Projectidentifiers for the US courts ( sample).The external key is recorded separately in the LRR, and the extraction scripts that generate machine-readable data from the registry can produce a mapping for systems that need to walk data from one schema to the other.Court identifier systems point at the same things so they will always be congruent: we should be safe.

    Thanks for mentioning Stéphane - we follow one another on Twitter, looks like it's time to talk!
  • alexanderschuster
    ECLI identifiers for the EU Member States are assigned by a national authority.So far also Italy has defined a standard.I saw a slide-show reporting it, but would have to look and find the list.

    This said, I would greatly support the idea of gathering a few jurists from civil-law countries in support to the work of better including also civil-law countries in the picture of MLZ.

    188BET靠谱吗Zotero should also have a translator for the new EURLEX portal, but I imagine that is quite a bit of work...
  • adamsmith
    188BET靠谱吗I'd generally be willing to help with the EURLEX portal, but I don't understand legal sources/citations well enough, so I'd need someone to walk me through what would need to go where in Zotero.Thread here:
    188BET靠谱吗https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1772/how-to-import-citation-data-of-european-union-official-documents/

    Not sure how much I can do for MLZ, though, I've never done translators for that.
  • fbennett
    The first question would be whether the API will yield structured metadata suitable for generating citations.The FAQgives details of the composition of the identifiers, and of URLs that yield various views of the documents themselves, but we'll need a means of acquiring citation details without screen-scraping.If that's possible, it might not be too much work to pull a full translator together.

    I'm in a standards groupwith some of the ELI developers, so I'll follow this up.
  • alexanderschuster
    If I can be of any help for the EURLEX translator, let me know.Perhaps the guys in Brussels that two years ago launched the new EurLex website would be willing to help out.After all, it's an added value to portal.I wanted to raise the point during the beta-testing stage, when I was invited, but failed, as I thought it was too late by then.

    188BET靠谱吗I would also like to see how we can work with MLZ and Zotero to increase the handling of civil law case-law.Any chance to move ahead?I would then be happy to try to develop an Italian style (being capable to work with HTML, I expect to get familiar with CSL).
  • fbennett
    To get things rolling with legal style development, the first priority is really to get modular support working in the processor.There are a bunch of problems to solve there.As a minimum we'll need:
    • A hook by which the processor can acquire style code on the fly;

    • A CSL API for style modules (effectively a standard set of macro names and a specification of what each should do);

    • Processor code to insert macro code into a running processor (this is the hard part)!and

    • Style modules to reproduce the behavior of existing legal styles
    For a EUR-Lex translator, API access to citation data would hugely simplify the work.Apparently that is shaping up.Stephane Cottin offers a couple of links to legislative metadata repositories - I haven't yet dug into them, but they look like what we're after:

    http://publications.europa.eu/mdr/
    http://publications.europa.eu/mdr/eli/index.html

    For case law, the Europe-wide identifier system is still in early development, but we can register what we know, and do mappings to the official identifiers for the rest when they eventually emerge.
  • zuphilip
    Related to EUR-Lex: 188BET靠谱吗https://github.com/zotero/translators/issues/768
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