Federal Case Citation Linking

[kfunk074]

We've been working with In re Black, which illustrates the problem pretty well. CAP has federal cases in its database, but only gives one "official" citation (3 F. Cas. 495 in this instance), while the case will be cited in a variety of reporters in the wild (2 Ben. 196 and 1 Bankr. Rep. 39 among others).

Unlike Kelly -> Ga. or Dick. -> N.J. Eq., federal cases were re-organized when published in an official reporter, so the volume and page numbers are entirely uncorrelated between nominate, specialized, and official reporters. The federal court system is one of the most important and likely influential jurisdictions in our period, but was also comparatively small (there were about 40 active federal judges issuing opinions only infrequently at any given point in the 19th century), so it's worth the effort to get the cases mapped out accurately, including having an RA do it by hand if needed.

But CAP does seem to have a library of parallel cites--see the API of In re Black above. CAP's own linking process doesn't seem to rely on this library--in CAP a cite to 2 Ben. 196 never links back to In re Black even though 2 Ben. 196 is in the API as a parallel cite.

Can we extract the list of parallel cites from CAP where given and then have an RA supplement any missing parallel cites?

[lmullen]

I will have to think about this. But for this specific case, there is this oddity:

Normally (I think?) CAP breaks out the parallel citations, but in this one they are all jammed up into a single entry. That makes it harder to find the parallel cites.

[kfunk074]

Browsing through, it seems like this is what CAP does anytime there is more than one possible parallel cite. (You can see which cases have parallel cites just browsing down this list for instance). Building our own library of federal cites may just require breaking this out into a table using the semicolon as a delimiter (which seems to be how it's consistently used).

[lmullen]

Yeah. Thankfully splitting on the semicolon will be trivial.

…

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 11:37 AM Kellen Funk ***@***.***> wrote: Browsing through, it seems like this is what CAP does anytime there is more than one possible parallel cite. (You can see which cases have parallel cites just browsing down this list <https://cite.case.law/f-cas/5/> for instance). Building our own library of federal cites may just require breaking this out into a table using the semicolon as a delimiter (which seems to be how it's consistently used). — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#79 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABM26GKURXUUN6JYHJERGDV3IY4LANCNFSM57ZNKK3Q> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[kfunk074]

Revised whitelist now points to the correct nominate reporter in CAP's list of parallel cites. May still need to isolate the parallel cites for the linking process to work.

[kfunk074]

You split rows on the semicolon, but CAP had some entries mistyped. An RA has cleaned up those entries, splitting the rows by hand. This table can now replace the split table you made.

split-parallel-cites 8.2.23.csv