I guess it's not necessary if we use Django's testcase class as our base testcase, which I hadn't considered. Otherwise doing this was the only way to get access to assertRaises, and the PEP8ification was just a nice-to-have along the way.

As for the 80 characters, PEP8 says you can go up to 100 if the team agrees, and I (possibly incorrectly) assumed the team would agree that 100 is a fine number. :P