Don't set court='scotus' for South Carolina citations

[mattdahl]

Eyecite thinks that South Carolina citations are SCOTUS citations:

from eyecite import get_citations
text = 'Lee County School Dist. No. 1 v. Gardner,  263 F.Supp. 26 (SC 1967)'
cites = get_citations(text)
cites[0].metadata.court

# prints 'scotus'

The SC in the year could be ambiguous, but the F.Supp. reporter should automatically rule SCOTUS out as a possibility for the court here.

[devlux76]

You will never see SC in the year field of a Supreme Court decision (if the person who wrote it is citing things properly).
The court is only included when the relevant court is unclear from the reporter cited.
The Supreme court will always be cited to the U.S. or the S.Ct. reporters unless it's a slip opininon, so there should never be any ambiguity.

Bluebook R. 10.4(b) State courts.

In general, indicate the state and court of decision. However, do not include the name of the court if the court of decision is the highest court of the state.
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation R. 10.4(b), at 106 (Columbia L. Rev. Ass’n et al. eds., 21st ed. 2020).*

[mlissner]

Thanks @devlux76. This looks like a great first bug. Any interest in trying to tackle it with a test and a fix?

[devlux76]

Sure! Do we know where this citation came from?
A search of "263 F.Supp. 26" on Westlaw shows just 5 citing cases.

Bowen v. Massachusetts, 487 U.S. 879, 108 S. Ct. 2722, 101 L. Ed. 2d 749 (1988)

Bd. of Pub. Instruction of Palm Beach Cty., Fla. v. Cohen, 413 F.2d 1201 (5th Cir. 1969)

Fort Sumter Tours, Inc. v. Andrus, 440 F. Supp. 914 (D.S.C.), aff'd, 564 F.2d 1119 (4th Cir. 1977)

Mandel v. U.S. Dep't of Health, Ed. & Welfare, 411 F. Supp. 542 (D. Md. 1976), rev'd in part, vacated in part sub nom. Mayor & City Council of Baltimore v. Mathews, 562 F.2d 914 (4th Cir. 1977), opinion withdrawn and superseded on reh'g, 571 F.2d 1273 (4th Cir. 1978), and aff'd sub nom. Mayor & City Council of Baltimore v. Mathews, 571 F.2d 1273 (4th Cir. 1978)

Cites above are from Westlaw, but links are to CourtListener

But I don't see any of them with the above citation just doing a fulltext search.
Is this coming from secondary authority of some kind?

[mlissner]

That'd be a question for @jcushman, but I suspect he wouldn't know anymore. At this point, it's worth just running with the example he gave. I'd make a test using it, make sure the test fails, then write the code to fix it.

[mattdahl]

The one I encountered it in was the Bowen case. Not sure if it got my version from Courtlistener or Lexis, but in the Courtlistener one you link you'll see it if you search 263 F. Supp. 26 (SC 1967). Thanks for working on this!!

[flooie]

Lets review this for this sprint to see if this is still occurring and issue

[quevon24]

It seems that it doesn't just fail there, the plaintiff is incorrect, it returns 1 instead of Lee County School Dist. No. 1

If you try to parse something like: 'Foo 12334 v. Bar, 1 U.S. 1' the plaintiff only returns the number, the defendant is correct

[quevon24]

It seems that it doesn't just fail there, the plaintiff is incorrect, it returns 1 instead of Lee County School Dist. No. 1

If you try to parse something like: 'Foo 12334 v. Bar, 1 U.S. 1' the plaintiff only returns the number, the defendant is correct

I think this happens because the current approach to get the plaintiff names is to get the two words before v., and the problem is that in those two words we count the spaces.

For example, if we pass this string Smith v. Bar, 263 F.Supp. 26 (SC 1967) we get this list of "words":

['Smith', ' ', StopWordToken(data='v.', start=6, end=8, groups={'stop_word': 'v'}), ' ', 'Bar,', ' ', CitationToken(data='263 F.Supp. 26', start=14, end=28, groups={'volume': '263', 'reporter': 'F.Supp.', 'page': '26'}, exact_editions=(), variation_editions=(Edition(reporter=Reporter(short_name='F. Supp.', name='Federal Supplement', cite_type='federal', source='reporters', is_scotus=False), short_name='F. Supp.', start=datetime.datetime(1932, 1, 1, 0, 0), end=datetime.datetime(1988, 12, 31, 0, 0)),), short=False), ' ', '(SC', ' ', '1967)']

The current algorithm looks for the stopword v. (It means there is a plaintiff), we use the stopword index from the word list to get the two previous elements in the list, in this case: `['Smith', ' '] which is correct. Here:

if isinstance(word, StopWordToken):
    if word.groups["stop_word"] == "v" and index > 0:
        citation.metadata.plaintiff = "".join(
            str(w) for w in words[max(index - 2, 0) : index]
        ).strip()

But it fails when the plaintiff has more than two words, for example: Lee County School Dist. No. 1 in Lee County School Dist. No. 1 v. Gardner, 263 F.Supp. 26 (SC 1967)

The algorithm will return this words list:

['Lee', ' ', 'County', ' ', 'School', ' ', 'Dist.', ' ', 'No.', ' ', '1', ' ', StopWordToken(data='v.', start=30, end=32, groups={'stop_word': 'v'}), ' ', 'Gardner,', ' ', CitationToken(data='263 F.Supp. 26', start=42, end=56, groups={'volume': '263', 'reporter': 'F.Supp.', 'page': '26'}, exact_editions=(), variation_editions=(Edition(reporter=Reporter(short_name='F. Supp.', name='Federal Supplement', cite_type='federal', source='reporters', is_scotus=False), short_name='F. Supp.', start=datetime.datetime(1932, 1, 1, 0, 0), end=datetime.datetime(1988, 12, 31, 0, 0)),), short=False), ' ', '(SC', ' ', '1967)']

and the two words before v. are: ['1', ' ']

I'm guessing this was set to two elements before v. because is common for plaintiffs to have short names.

That's why I'm thinking about how we can adjust this.

[quevon24]

It seems that it doesn't just fail there, the plaintiff is incorrect, it returns 1 instead of Lee County School Dist. No. 1
If you try to parse something like: 'Foo 12334 v. Bar, 1 U.S. 1' the plaintiff only returns the number, the defendant is correct

I think this happens because the current approach to get the plaintiff names is to get the two words before v., and the problem is that in those two words we count the spaces.

For example, if we pass this string Smith v. Bar, 263 F.Supp. 26 (SC 1967) we get this list of "words":

['Smith', ' ', StopWordToken(data='v.', start=6, end=8, groups={'stop_word': 'v'}), ' ', 'Bar,', ' ', CitationToken(data='263 F.Supp. 26', start=14, end=28, groups={'volume': '263', 'reporter': 'F.Supp.', 'page': '26'}, exact_editions=(), variation_editions=(Edition(reporter=Reporter(short_name='F. Supp.', name='Federal Supplement', cite_type='federal', source='reporters', is_scotus=False), short_name='F. Supp.', start=datetime.datetime(1932, 1, 1, 0, 0), end=datetime.datetime(1988, 12, 31, 0, 0)),), short=False), ' ', '(SC', ' ', '1967)']

The current algorithm looks for the stopword v. (It means there is a plaintiff), we use the stopword index from the word list to get the two previous elements in the list, in this case: `['Smith', ' '] which is correct. Here:

if isinstance(word, StopWordToken):
    if word.groups["stop_word"] == "v" and index > 0:
        citation.metadata.plaintiff = "".join(
            str(w) for w in words[max(index - 2, 0) : index]
        ).strip()

But it fails when the plaintiff has more than two words, for example: Lee County School Dist. No. 1 in Lee County School Dist. No. 1 v. Gardner, 263 F.Supp. 26 (SC 1967)

The algorithm will return this words list:

['Lee', ' ', 'County', ' ', 'School', ' ', 'Dist.', ' ', 'No.', ' ', '1', ' ', StopWordToken(data='v.', start=30, end=32, groups={'stop_word': 'v'}), ' ', 'Gardner,', ' ', CitationToken(data='263 F.Supp. 26', start=42, end=56, groups={'volume': '263', 'reporter': 'F.Supp.', 'page': '26'}, exact_editions=(), variation_editions=(Edition(reporter=Reporter(short_name='F. Supp.', name='Federal Supplement', cite_type='federal', source='reporters', is_scotus=False), short_name='F. Supp.', start=datetime.datetime(1932, 1, 1, 0, 0), end=datetime.datetime(1988, 12, 31, 0, 0)),), short=False), ' ', '(SC', ' ', '1967)']

and the two words before v. are: ['1', ' ']

I'm guessing this was set to two elements before v. because is common for plaintiffs to have short names.

That's why I'm thinking about how we can adjust this.

I'll move this to a new issue so we can close this one, now we can relate SC to South Carolina instead of scotus. A test case has been added.