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

​My only suggestion and helpful guidance here would be...

​​
perhaps looking at other high level schema
​and vocabulary ​
for court systems that are
​already ​
out there.
​

​Think about what consumers or different users will want to filter by
primarily.  If its a student researcher, they are searching differently by
Case Types typically, compared to someone just wanting to see the summary
judgement of a specific case X v. Y​

​Each court system and state courts do their own Schema manipulation and
have differing standards... there is no single standard for e-Filing or
Reference systems unfortunately in the USA.  Even if Schema.org was
involved, it would probably not change publicly facing resources very
quickly because they are so ingrained in their current architectures and
have little budget to enhance those typically.  But regardless, an effort
should be made for Schema.org and extensions to provide some high level
schema to help cross the gaps and digital divide on those documents
especially for the public good.​

​
​
Here's some I found :

This one provides nice XSD files with some noteworthy enumerations inside
of them.:​​
http://mncourts.gov/default.aspx?page=1379&printFriendly=true
(I look
​ed over​
 the Chameleon files
​quickly​
)

​http://www.xmllegal.org/CourtXML/
​
​Best,​


Thad
+ThadGuidry <https://www.google.com/+ThadGuidry>

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 11:43 AM, Stuart Robinson <stuartro@google.com>
wrote:

> I've noticed that schema.org doesn't provide vocabulary for legal
> decisions--e.g., the Supreme Court case Citizens United vs Federal Election
> Commission:
>
> http://en.wikipedia..org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
> <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, both within and between countries.
> 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]
>
> 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 (e.g., US-specificity) and
> feedback on the specific proposal would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Stuart Robinson
>