For the Case type, add a "Judge" name type.

[JohnLukeBentley]

... as the title specifies.

[fbennett]

This would in effect be an alias for Author, and so could be handled by just adjusting the label. We should step carefully here, though, and be clear about what a Judge field is meant to be used for. There is a lot of complexity lurking in case-related materials (the API design for CourtListener in the US gives a sense of the potential depth of the rabbit hole).

One thing likely to come up that Juris-M should probably not attempt to handle is separation of a judgment into individual opinions. The Author/Judge field is handy for search-and-retrieval purposes, but I would be reluctant to incorporate it into citations.

[JohnLukeBentley]

I'm legally naive in the sense of being relatively unfamiliar with conventions around legal citations (which is part of the my motivation for wanting to use something like JurisM). I'm also, of course, new to JurisM and have some learning to do about how it all hangs together.

However, that nativity aside, all that you've written above seems spot on.

So I naively understand that broadly speaking, around the world, cases aren't cited by the judges' names. So, for example, a multi-judge US supreme court case is cited (using JM Indigo Book) as
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 89 S. Ct. 1827, 23 L. Ed. 2d 430, 1969 U.S. LEXIS 1367, CourtListener (United States) - whether the judges have a unanimous opinion or not.

JurisM (using JM Indigo Book as an example) also seems to handle this correctly at the moment even if I enter in judges names as Authors. That is, the citation is returned as above even if I've listed many Authors in JurisM.

So your thoughts on the matter seem correct: Judge is perhaps best understood (and implemented) as an alias for an Author; there would need to be consideration around preventing Judges names from appearing in citations; and there'll be other complexities beyond that.

[JohnLukeBentley]

In 5.0.39m15 I'm not seeing a Judge alias. Did you close this in error or otherwise resolve the issue?

[fbennett]

Internally it would involve casting a fresh creator type in the database, to which the label would be attached. This doesn't seem an urgent item, and can be done without impacting user data, but it can be done when other changes are also made to the Case type (the ordering of fields probably needs some attention, for one). If you prefer to keep the thread open, can do.

[JohnLukeBentley]

We'll it's up to you how you want to manage gitbub issues. But I'd suggest that if you think an issue successfully identifies something to-do then it is worth keeping an issue open. Even if that to-do is quite a way off into the future.

If you wanted to identify a bunch of issues that you want to include in a next release then you could avail yourself of an issue label. E.g. For 5.0.39m20 (or whatever).

So, yes, on this issue I'd suggest we keep it open.

[fbennett]

Done!

[georgd]

There’s some complexity in this matter that might need consideration, if this were ever treated: In the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Advocate General (kind of a legal advisor to the court), is regularly cited with his/her opinion on a case. In Juris-M there’s a separate 'court' ag for the Advocate General and citations of this court have the Advocate General as author. Labelling that with judge might cause bigger confusion.