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Subject: LRR: identifiers for divisions of a court
A release of the MLZ reference manager that uses the LRR identifiers went out a few days ago, and there has been some feedback from users. One item of interest is the need to specify divisions of a court within the identifier: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/46508?page=1#Item_4 This seems a good time for an informal explanation of the structure of the LRR identifiers. (The use of the identifiers in the MLZ user interface is shown in the attached screenshot.) ## Description Here is the identifier for Section I of the European Court of Human Rights under the Council of Europe: coe.int;echr~section.1 Identifiers are expressed as lower-case ASCII 128 letters, numbers, periods, colons, semicolons, and tilde characters. Other characters are not permitted. As shown in the example above, an LRR identifier consists of at most three elements: a Jurisdiction specifier; a semicolon-separated Court specifier; and a tilde-separated Court Division specifier. (1) Jurisdiction specifier (coe.int) A jurisdiction specifier is a colon-delimited list of one or more elements, beginning with the element having the largest scope. The first element may be the ISO 3166 code for a top-level national jurisdiction, or an arbitrary code identifying a non-national scope ending in ".int". Sub-elements following the top-level are not an expression of judicial or administrative hierarchy. At the technical level, their only role is to prevent namespace conflicts among entities that share the same Court specifier. The subelements should, however, loosely reflect the organization of institutions within the national jurisdiction, as they will be used to generate menus, information pages, and the like. (2) Court specifier (echr) A court specifier follows the Jurisdiction specifier, and is separated from it by a semicolon. The court specifier should be derived from the name of target institution, either as a set of initials (where these are widely recognized) or as a roman transliteration of the name in its original language. It identifies an institution with decision-making authority. In jurisdictions that recognize multiple official languages, the English form is preferred as the base language for deriving the identifier. This is not a reflection of priority or relative authority; it is simply a matter of technical convenience. (3) Court Division specifier (section.1) A Court Division specifier follows the Court specifier, and is separated from it by a tilde. The court division specifier is derived in the same way as the Court specifier. Where roman numerals are used in the human-readable name, arabic numerals should be used. ## Differences from URN:LEX While the LRR identifiers resemble the URN:LEX scheme, there are significant differences, driven by the differing objectives of the two systems. The URL:LEX schema is here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-spinosa-urn-lex/?include_text=1 URL:LEX seeks to give semantic expression to the structure of authority within target jurisdictions, and objective closely tied to the requirement that identifiers be settled by national authority (schema 5.2). To permit lightweight assignment of identifiers for referencing convenience, the LRR abandons the strict alignment of identifier structure with the hierarchy of authority. One consequence of the difference is that an LRR identifier need not change when the status of a sub-jurisdiction changes. For example, the code for Hawai'i in the United States would be "us:hi" both before and after statehood. In the structure of identifiers, the LRR draws a distinction between scope of jurisdiction (the first specifier) and the lawmaking body (the second specifier). This does not appear to be the case in URN:LEX (schema 4.4). The distinction is important in the LRR, because the two must be stored to separate fields in descriptive citation data. To avoid confusion between the two schemes, the LRR adopts ".int" rather than ".lex" as the suffix for non-national scopes (see schema 2.4). Finally, the LRR uses the tilde separator to specify the division of a law-issuing body, so that it can be parsed out and stored in descriptive citation data. As far as I can tell, the current draft of URN:LEX does not provide a means of encoding this information. Frank
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