Abbreviation list revision

[fbennett]

Both the design and the guidance on abbreviation of jurisdictions and court names was flawed in the 4.0 release. A sound design is now in place, but users with existing abbreviation lists will suffer inconvenience when migrating to 5.0. To reduce the burden of migration, it will be useful to revise the bundled abbreviation lists to cover, at least, the most commonly cited US courts, and issue instructions on how to install the revised list on an existing system.

[fbennett]

Juris-M uses an SQL construct to produce courts linked to their jurisdiction. It's kind of elaborate, but it works a treat. Configured to return US courts, it looks like this:

select JU.jurisdictionID,JU.jurisdictionName,courtID,courtName from jurisdictions JU 
    join courtJurisdictionLinks CJL using(jurisdictionIdx) 
    join courts using(courtIdx) 
    join countryCourtLinks CCL using(countryCourtLinkIdx) 
    join courtNames CN using(courtNameIdx) 
    join jurisdictions CO ON CO.jurisdictionIdx=CCL.countryIdx 
    where JU.jurisdictionID='US' OR JU.jurisdictionID like 'us:%';

Run against a Juris-M database, that yields a complete list of courts and their associated jurisdictions (well, at least all of the ones Juris-M knows about). If that is dropped into a CSV file, we can open it as a spreadsheet, add an abbreviations column, and manually stir in abbreviation data scraped from the HTML version of the Indigo Book. Dumping the finished sheet back to CSV, we can generate an Abbrevs Filter import file from it, and ship that with the client.

You would still have to adjust the jurisdiction and court values on many references, but everything set to an expected value would produce the correct abbreviated element in the document.

I will be taking time out over the next couple of days to prepare for a 10-day US trip, but this seems like a good way to pass the time with during the flight. If I can get the spreadsheet dump done before I leave, I'll send it along---maybe via the mailing list we can divvy up the work among a few people, even.

[fbennett]

Oh. That was easy. Here's a dump of the data.

• courts-and-jurisdictions-all-us.zip

What do you think? Worth a pleading note to the list?

[fbennett]

Looking again at the client, I see what you mean about the field clobbering anything non-conformant. Correct behavior would be to accept non-listed entries, but highlight them in yellow. I'll see if I can get that fixed soonish.

(Edit: Well, that's weird. Now it does allow me to save unlisted field values, although it doesn't yellow-highlight them when saved.)

(Edit: Ah, okay. When the field has a listed entry, attempting the save a non-listed entry clobbers the field content. Afterward, saves work again. Definitely not well behaved.)