Note: Work In Progress

This is extremely not finished. The README here is also out of date — there are changes afoot regarding the availability of CSL-M-level features elsewhere, so for now, a CSL-M style is not being actively developed.

How to use this guide

Citing legal materials is complicated, but the days of typing out footnotes with fiddly italics, manually managing ibid and footnote numbers and messing up by missing a comma are fading fast. This project includes implementations of AGLC4 in CSL and CSL-M, to be used with Zotero/Mendeley/many others or Juris-M respectively. This documentation aims to cover all the different ways you can use the styles to automatically produce compliant AGLC4 citations.

This documentation is generated from a test suite. Each test in the suite is associated with a particular rule with which it is attempting to check compliance. It should be presumed that an AGLC rule not found here should be entered manually in a footnote. Due to the complexity of the AGLC, it will sometimes be necessary to use the tools in an unintuitive or non-standard way — these cases are documented.

Each of the two documentation sets can be navigated using the same table of contents as the AGLC4 book itself. Many of the test cases are lifted from the book. Each rule can be linked to by clicking the anchor next to the rule title and copying the resulting URL.

CSL? CSL-M? Zotero? Juris-M?

This project works with two closely related but different kinds of citation processor. You can pick which documentation set of CSL or CSL-M to browse at the top of the page. They are:

• CSL: Citation Style Language. It is very widely supported, but lacks a host of features and fields necessary to comply with many of the rules.
• CSL-M: A variant of CSL built with the sprawling complexity of legal citations in mind. It supports adapting to different jurisdictions and languages, along with many law-specific features and fields. It is less widely supported: it can only be used with the Juris-M reference manager. At present, the only way to use it in a document is with the Juris-M Microsoft Word plugin, however a project is under way to rewrite the processor such that CSL-M can be used with Pandoc as well. CSL-M was developed by Frank Bennett of Nagoya University, largely to cover the Bluebook citation system.

Because of the different feature sets, large swathes of the AGLC can only be covered by the CSL-M variant. If you are a current, happy CSL user (i.e. you only cite Australian reported judgments, legislation, journal articles and books), you can proceed as usual. If you find yourself citing parliamentary committee hearings, foreign domestic or international materials like treaties, reports with institutional authors, the less common unreported case modes, or you’re generally hitting the edge cases in the AGLC, you may wish to switch. A project for a later date is to add a comparison chart based on the test suites.

Installing

These styles can’t really be installed through the standard channels yet. When they can be, it will be documented here.

Rules

Following is an example rule. You will notice it comprises two test cases, one of which has failed, because the result was not identical to the expected output. Rules might include documentation that explains how to get the style to do what you want, or warnings about what you must or mustn’t do for correct output.

…

Cite clusters

A cite cluster looks like prefix @citekey locator label locator suffix.

You enter these with the Microsoft Word plugin and its cite entry UI, or in Pandoc using the [prefix @citekey label locator suffix] syntax (see the manual for more).

A semicolon in the cluster means there are multiple cites:

prefix @citekey ; second prefix @key2.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the University of Technology Sydney for supporting the development of the CSL-M style.