Re: vocabulary for legal decisions (e.g., Supreme Court cases)

On 21 May 2015 at 01:03, Stuart Robinson <stuartro@google.com> wrote:
> It would be nice if we could provide markup about legal decisions in
> schema.org--for example,
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
> http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=000&invol=08-205
>
> One challenge for modeling this domain is coming up with a model that
> accommodates different types of courts internationally. It may be easier to
> develop a model for US legal decisions first and then expand it later or
> create other types for non-US courts..
>
> With that in mind, I would propose the type USLegalDecision with the
> following properties:
>
> name: the name of the decision (for Supreme Court cases, usually something
> like "X v Y")
> court: the court where the decision was made (e.g., Supreme Court)
> country:the country where the decision applies
> whenArgued: the date on which arguments
> whenDecided: the date on which the decision was rendered
> citation: the case citation for the decision
> courtAppealedFrom: which court the case was appealed from (optional since
> some cases low-level courts aren't appealed from another court) [note:
> optional given that a decision in a lower court won't be appealed from
> another court]
>
> So, using the Citizens United example, here's what the values might look
> like:
>
> name: "Citizens United versus FEC"
> court: "Supreme Court"
> country: "USA"
> whenArgued: [ "March 24, 2009", "September 9, 2009" ]
> whenDecided: "January 21, 2010"
> citation: "Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm'n, (558 U.S. ___ (2010);
> Docket No. 08-205)"
> courtAppealedFrom: "United States District Court for the District of
> Columbia"
>
> There are some additional properties to consider, such as the following:
>
> Judge(s)
> OpinionAuthor
> ConcurrenceAuthor
> DissentAuthor
> LegalHolding(s)
>
> Thoughts on the general modeling issues here and feedback on the specific
> proposal would be greatly appreciated.

This sounds worthwhile to me. The painful decision of course is the
one you highlight: whether to do something detailed/accurate but US
specific, or try to make the definitions general (vague?) enough to
cover other jurisdictions too.

I've fwd'd this to a few (mostly European) contacts who might be
interested, if they are I'll encourage them to collaborate here and
GitHub.  It would probably help if we could throw together a quick
test build of the site that had a draft vocabulary + examples
implemented, to encourage discussion from people who aren't following
schema.org super closely...

cheers,

Dan


> Thanks,
> Stuart Robinson
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 22 May 2015 13:05:24 UTC