The +OSCN hypertext citations
(A proof of the +Cite Concept)
The +OSCN Hypertext Parallel Citations for Oklahoma criminal case law
The +OSCN Hypertext OK CR Citations for Oklahoma criminal case law
The +OSCN Hypertext OK Citations for Oklahoma Supreme Court case law
Creating the +OSCN hypertext parallel and +OSCN citations
The project of creating the citation files released May 24 and June 8, 2015, involved the following fun and games:
1. Manually collecting hypertext links to all current OK CR (20,100, from 1908-2015) and OK cites (40,640, from 1890 to 2015) from the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network (OSCN), the URLs for which I stored here and here.
2. Removing the hyperlinks and creating working plaintext files of all cites.
3. Reversing and editing the backward citation strings as published on OSCN into proper citation format.
4. Recapturing the hypertext links (my original files got lost, scrambled, etc.) and joining these to the plain text in adjacent columns of massive OpenOffice spreadsheets. Many (hundreds) of the citations were edited to attain consistent and more concise case styles throughout. At this point I removed the old Oklahoma Criminal Reports citations from cases before 1953, and the Oklahoma Reports citations from the Supreme Court cases.
5. I was unable to concatenate the two cells of the spreadsheet into a single string, instead outputting the spreadsheet as two column webpages, shown here and here.
6. I then copied the html source to a new text file, searched for and replaced the table and formatting tags from the html source, uniting the plaintext and hypertext elements into the single HTML paragraphs shown here. I replaced the old OKCR/date/casestyle hypertext with the parallel citations (a nod to tradition) and +OSCN hypertext for each case using regex search and replace operations, which went surprisingly well.
7. Finally, the parallel Pacific Reporter citations were removed by regex operations, leaving only the +OSCN hypercitation prototype (I'm no fan of the old parallel citations these days). I used only OSCN citations for the OK Supreme Court cases, due to inconsistent Pacific coverage in later years and the problems of maintaining parallel cites for so many cases not yet assigned a P.3d citation.
8. Who really cares? I'm not sure. A few intrepid practitioners could use these citations to submit properly formatted, plaintext authority (all that the court rules currently require) and an unobtrusive +OSCN hyperlink (those long OSCN links is pretty long, indeed) in PDF smartmotions, and hyperbriefs, placing cited authority just one click away.
9. Hypertext citation forms are easily integrated in motions and briefs using ordinary word processors. Future phases of the project might include applications, browser plug-ins, or sites designed for better search and retrieval of citations. On the server side, these modernized citation formats could be added to OSCN source files like this with a bit of engineering. Suggestion for improvements to this citation prototype are welcome.
10. The lists are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Bookmark them and use them in good health! Any practitioners using +OSCN citations in prototype smartmotions or smartbriefs can send me samples of their PDFs and I'll display them here.
Thanks to John David Echols for advice and help with regular expressions!
Bryan Dupler
May 24, 2015
Updated June 8, 16, 2015; November 30, 2016
Norman, OK