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IANAL. But I want to cite one particular court decision. It's a German court and the complete code (or whatever you call that) for that verdict is: "BVerfG · Urteil vom 15. Dezember 1983 · Az. 1 BvR 209/83, 1 BvR 440/83, 1 BvR 420/83, 1 BvR 362/83, 1 BvR 269/83, 1 BvR 484/83 (Volkszählungsurteil)"

Needless to say that I have no idea what all these reference numbers mean. I was hoping that someone already had implemented the jurisdiction entry type that biblatex only provides as "unsupported".

Yeah, Plan B is to just paste that stuff in misc and stop caring. But, you know ...

lockstep
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Christian
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  • Just to be sure: Did you try already biblatex-jura or biblatex-juradiss? The latter comes with a German documentation and exactly your wanted entry type. – Speravir Oct 11 '12 at 00:43
  • If you only have one such decision to cite and you don't know what the numbers mean, I would definitely suggest you go for plan B. Or if you want a more semantical approach, you could declare jurisdiction as a synonym of misc and stop caring. Writing (or copying) a whole legal citation style for one entry is really not worth it (both in terms of time and in terms of code / memory). – ienissei Oct 11 '12 at 06:45
  • I'm just copied the citation style from the biblatex-juradiss package that @Speravir suggested and tried to change it in a straightforward way to a bibliography style (which the package doesn't provide). It was worth it in the sense that I learned that adding "Urteil" is absolutely necessary for the thing to make sense (I had just left it out). If the result looks ok I will post it here even though it will be a hack. If not, I will go for Plan B ;) – Christian Oct 11 '12 at 07:03
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    @Christian Hacks are the best part of many (Bib)LaTeX projects :) – ienissei Oct 11 '12 at 08:02
  • @ienissei Well, judge for yourself ... I don't know enough of BibLaTeX to start much of a project and I don't have any reason to invest any time in this particular citation soooo ... maybe it's not the kind of hack you had in mind ;) – Christian Oct 11 '12 at 08:41
  • Slightly related: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/53589/how-do-i-cite-laws-or-regulations-in-biblatex – Christian Jul 16 '13 at 15:18

1 Answers1

4

Well, this sure ain't pretty but maybe someone will improve on it. Not me. To me this is just that tiny bit better than just using misc and I don't need more. This is based on biblatex-juradiss and I kept the German comments. The fields are explained in the German biblatex-juradiss documentation. Well, this is optimised for German court decisions anyway so maybe this is not too catastrophic.

\DeclareBibliographyDriver{jurisdiction}{%
  \usebibmacro{bibindex}%
  \usebibmacro{begentry}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \iffieldundef{usera}%Urteil oder Beschluss
    {\nopunct}
    {\printfield[default]{usera}\space%
  of\space{}the\space}%
  \printnames[default]{author}%
  \space{}from\space\usebibmacro{date}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \printfield[default]{userb}% Aktenzeichen
  \iffieldundef{userc}%Primaere Fundstelle (Name und Jahr) vorhanden?
    {\nopunct}
    {\space%
      \printfield[default]{userc}}%
  \iffieldundef{postnote}{%Angabe einer konkreten Fundstelle?
    \iffieldundef{userc}{}{%
      \addcomma\space
      \printfield[default]{userd}}% Erste Seite der primären Fundstelle 
    \iffieldundef{journaltitle}{}{%Sekundäre Fundstelle vorhanden?
      \addspace\mkbibparens{%
        =\space%
        \printfield{journaltitle}\space%Zeitschriftentitel
        \printfield{usere}\addcomma\space%Zeitschriftenjahrgang
        \printfield{pages}}%Erste Seite der Zeitschriftenfundstelle
    }%
  }%
  {}% 
  \iffieldundef{userf}{}{%Entscheidungsname vorhanden?
    \addspace\printfield[parens]{userf}}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \usebibmacro{url+urldate}
  \usebibmacro{addendum+pubstate}%
  \setunit{\bibpagerefpunct}\newblock
  \usebibmacro{pageref}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \usebibmacro{related}%
  \usebibmacro{finentry}%
}

According to the documentation you need this in a biber.conf file that is put next to your document. For me, the file is read by biber but it does exactly nothing at all.

<map>
  <bibtex>
    <globalfield>
        decision            usera
        sign                userb
        officialvolume      userc
        officialpages       userd
        journalyear         usere
        decisionname        userf
    </globalfield>
  </bibtex>
</map>

Thus for the example in my question I used this entry where all user* fields are present twice, hoping that maybe one day I can remove the cryptic ones.

@JURISDICTION{bvg1983,
  author = {{Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (BVerG)}},
  decision = {Judgement},
  usera = {Judgement},
  sign = {Az. 1 BvR 209/83, 1 BvR 440/83, 1 BvR 420/83, 1 BvR 362/83, 1 BvR 269/83, 1 BvR 484/83},
  userb = {Az. 1 BvR 209/83, 1 BvR 440/83, 1 BvR 420/83, 1 BvR 362/83, 1 BvR 269/83, 1 BvR 484/83},
  owner = {cmertes},
  urldate = {2012-10-11},
  language = {german},
  url = {http://openjur.de/u/268440.html},
  urldate = {2012-10-11},
  date = {1983-12-15},
  decisionname = {Volkszählungsurteil},
  userf = {Volkszählungsurteil},
  timestamp = {2012.10.11}
}

This produces the following result. For everything else, I take no guarantee. But please correct any mistakes I made because BibLaTeX is very new to me.

resulting bibliography entry

Christian
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