Juris-M / jm-styles

Juris-M styles: extended CSL styles with jurisdiction support

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Restatements and similar documents can either be stored accessibly or rendered correctly but not both.

dchawisher opened this issue · comments

As the examples of the restatement sections in the Indigo Book/Juris-M integration show (especially the contrast between the Servitudes section, which has an article title, and the others, which don't), the Indigo Book citation style currently renders Encyclopedia Articles, etc., poorly. The colon between Encyclopedia Title and Article Title means that except for the Third Restatements, which have a colon in the restatement name, there is no good way to save restatement sections individually.

For efficient browsing of saved research, the thing to do is save the entire section title as the article title (e.g. "§ 410 Contractor's Conduct in Obedience to Employer's Directions"). But to render the citation correctly, one would have to omit the article title and either enter the section number in "pages" or else enter the section number as a locator when citing.

Three possibilities for fixing this by changing the Indigo Book style:

  1. Remove the colon between encyclopedia title and article title; render using the short-title field rather than the full title.
  2. Don't render the article title at all; use the "pages" field to store the section number.
  3. Do either (1) or (2), but for the legal-commentary item type; save items like Restatement sections, Am Jur articles, and CJS entries as legal commentary rather than encyclopedia.

Could you give a link to the specific item you think is problematic?

In Rule 18.2 in the Juris-M/Indigo Book page, look at the three restatements. Compare the entries for the Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers and the Restatement of Trusts with the entry for the Restatement of Servitudes.

A citation for the Restatement 2d Trusts should render like this: Restatement (Second) of Trusts § 46 (Am. Law Inst. 1959). To do that, the following fields are entered into Juris-M.

Encyclopedia Title | Restatement (Second) of Trusts
Publisher | Am. Law Inst.
Date | 1959
Locator | sec. 46
Position | First reference

Note that there is no article title, because the article title would be rendered after the encyclopedia title, like so: Restatement (Second) of Trusts: ARTICLETITLE § 46 (Am. Law Inst. 1959).

In consequence, if I save multiple restatement sections to Juris-M, it will look like this:
image

If you look at the metadata for the Restatement of Servitudes entry at the same link, you'll see that it uses a kludge to store an article title. The full title of the Restatement of Servitudes is "Restatement (Third) of Property: Servitudes," so the record stores "Servitudes § 7" as the article title. This is a bit more usable than having no article title at all. In the Juris-M interface, it will look like this:
image
But (a) it only works if the restatement title has a colon in it, (b) it doesn't allow you to see the actual section title when browsing your research, because that title would render along with the section number in the citations, and (c) it's a bit of a kludge.

The ideal solution would look like this: image

I am storing restatement sections as statutes for now because I am using a custom style that, by sheer chance, can render a restatement citation correctly if it treats it as a statute.