Bennett on Jurisdictions, Abbreviation Lists, and Parallel Articles in Multilingual Zotero

Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has posted Multilingual Zotero: jurisdictions, and much else, at CitationStylist.

Here are excerpts of the law-related news in the post:

Jurisdiction input helper. Legal styles in [Multilingual Zotero (MLZ)] rely on URN:LEX codes for jurisdictions and international organizations. This works fine once the data has been entered correctly, but there is many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip, and looking up these codes in a table is an awkwardness that we are here to avoid. A right-click over the Extra field will now open a context menu of the nations of the world, and selected international institutions, with sub-menus for federal jurisdictions. The jurisdiction lists are a first draft: the data is housed on GitHub, and I am very much open to revision proposals. This was prompted in large part by recent exchanges with user Isis on the Zotero forums, where the importance of better UI support for manual data entry became clear.

Abbreviation lists. The minimal abbreviation lists used for testing are now beginning to fill out. Many thanks to Julia Caldwell for getting the ball rolling on this front through her excellent work on the New Zealand Law style and its companion abbreviation list.

Parallel articles. As parallel support now appears to be working reliably for statutes and case reports, I have extended the behaviour to cover serialised journal articles. This does not work for all styles, but those for which it fails cannot be smoothly formatted as collapsed parallels in any case [...]

URN:LEX is an international standard for legal identifiers, in the form of Uniform Resource Names (URNs).

Multilingual Zotero is an unofficial “fork” of the Zotero open source citation management software.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Bennett on URN:LEX Codes for U.S. Legal Materials in Multilingual Zotero

Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has posted Proposed urn:lex codes for US materials in MLZ, at CitationStylist.

Here is a summary of the post:

The [Multilingual Zotero (MLZ)] styles rely on a urn:lex-like scheme for specifying the jurisdiction of primary legal materials. We will need to have at least a minimal set of jurisdction codes in place for the styles to be functional. The scheme to be used for this purpose is the subject of this post.

URN:LEX is an international standard for legal identifiers, in the form of Uniform Resource Names (URNs).

Multilingual Zotero is an unofficial “fork” of the Zotero open source citation management software.

Professor Bennett’s post includes examples.

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @fgbjr.

Bennett on Zotero 4 Law and OpenCongress

Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has posted @Zotero 4 Law and OpenCongress.org, at CitationStylist.

Here is a summary of the post:

I am very happy to announce the first operational end-to-end research and citation pipeline for MLZ [Multilingual Zotero] and its family of legal styles. The target site is OpenCongress.org, the excellent legislative tracking site sponsored by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. A screencast covering installation, content download and document drafting (in the breathtakingly short interval of 12 minutes) is available.

Professor Bennett adds:

The screencast shows only the capture of US Code provisions affected by an amending Act. With a bit more effort, we should be able to extend the software to cover the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and statutes referred to only by their popular names. It might be awhile before that happens, but it’s on the do-list. Contributions to that effort (of any sort) would of course be most welcome.

For more information, please see the complete post.