This is either an off-schema issue, or one for the next cycle,
depending on the preferred solutio0. Here goes …
Styles that attempt to handle law cases use the title field for party
names. This works pretty well for common law jurisdictions, but in
the civil law countries I’m familiar with, cites to case reports do
not include that information; all you need is the court, the date of
the decision, the journal volume and page, and the publication date.
Like so:
Common law: Smith v. Jones, 100 US 299 (1901).
Civil law: Grand Court of Judicature, 12 Daihan minroku 1232 (Oct. 10, 1906).
Or words to that effect.
In comparative law writing, we need to be able to mix cites of the two
styles. As things are done now, it is easy enough to discriminate
between the two forms by the presence or absence of the title field.
The problem is that the entry then shows up in Zotero with no title
information, which makes the entry pretty nearly useless for reference
purposes.
A solution is needed for this. I can think of two ways to go.
(1) Keep things as they are, and expect clients to do some sort of
fallback magic to provide useful information in the UI; or
(2) Add a “party-names” field, and use that for rendering in CSL,
instead of title. Then the client can stuff some arbitrary
informative value into the title field for law cases, and they will
still render correctly for common law and civil law cites.
I guess that (1) is cleaner (adding a field, party-names, seems a bad
idea, and duplicating data in two fields, title and party-names, would
almost certainly lead to confusion). But if anyone has an idea how to
approach this, ideas would be very welcome.
Frank