Court id data error

[rachlllg]

Assuming the court_id return by find_court should match the id from our courts database, I believe these are possible data errors in the court id returned by find_court

• The court id for "Supreme Court of The Commonwealth of The Northern Mariana Islands" should be nmariana instead of nmi. nmi does not exist in our courts database.
• The court id for "Superior Court of The District of Columbia" returned by find_court is supctdc, this id does not exist in our courts database, and neither does "Superior Court of The District of Columbia".

[flooie]

You should not expect a 1-to-1 match between our courts database and courts-db.

Courts-db was never intended to be a direct replication of our internal database. In some cases, courts are added to courts-db that don’t exist in our system, particularly when we have no opinions yet or are foreign courts or other edge cases.

Adding a new court to our database is a time consuming process due to the constraints on the CL side, but we try to bring over courts when it makes sense.

[rachlllg]

I was using courts-db to map the scotus provided lower court name string to our court_id for appellate chain linking, but sounds like perhaps courts-db is not the best tool for this? Would this issue #115 still make sense to be worked on or there is perhaps not as much value here?

[flooie]

This is the right place and tool to do what you are talking about, I think. We should build up a list of court strings that do not match, and we should use that information to improve courts-db data. I was simply stating before that courts-db is not a mirror of CL, one because of how the two developed, and that courts-db should be a superset of what is in the CL database.

[rachlllg]

A recap of our discussion:

• If courts-db returns an id and the id exists in our database, the id should match the id for that court in our database (to be verified)
• if courts-db returns an id and the id doesn't exist in our database, it could be:
  • 1. the court doesn't exist in our database because we don't have any data for it - there is no need to add the court to our database as it's a large exercise and doesn't add much value
  • 2. the court exists in our database but under a different name variation - we may enhance courts-db so it matches this name variation
• if courts-db doesn't return an id - we should enhance courts-db to include this court (or name variation of this court) so it returns an id Enhance courts-db with lower court info from SCOTUS #115