The sources of law and the conventions for citing them vary among jurisdictions. The current approach in CSL-m styles is to support all jurisdictions in a single style file. This is not sustainable. For maintainability, styles should cover the relevant guide's requirements for secondary and non-legal sources, and refer to an appropriate legal support module when legal items are encountered. This will require several changes:
- A mechanism for loading additional style code into the running processor;
- A CSL element for invoking the loading mechanism on demand;
- A set of fixed coding conventions (a kind of macro API) for legal style modules.
This document lays out a rough specification for these facilities, for reference in building modular legal support.
The interface for the supplementary style loading method, which must be provided by the calling application, is:
citeproc.sys.loadJurisdictionStyle(jurisdiction, variantName)
- jurisdiction
<string> - The jurisdiction set on the item. A match will be attempted against available styles iteratively, removing elements from the end of the jurisdiction until a match is found or the match fails. On failure, a default legal style (specified by the calling style) will be installed if necessary.
- variantName
<string> - An optional variant name. If specified, a match to a style with the variant name will be attempted before falling back to the default form. The default form is static for the jurisdiction, and beyond the control of the calling style.
The <legal/> CSL element forces a call to loadJurisdictionStyle(),
and passes control to the appropriate style module (match or default) for
the remaining processing of the item. It should therefore be set at the
start of processing under <citation/> or <bibliography/>. It
has one required attribute, and several required subelements:
- default
<string> - The default jurisdiction to call if a match is not available.