Schema for legal judgements?

Hi,

I am wondering if there is a schema for legal decisions. Legal cases are
usually documented in specialized databases, but more and more cases are
published on the internet and can be searched there. Finding relevant
decisions would be easier if there was a common way to describe them.

There are these properties of a legal decision I can think of:

Necessary ones:
- The court, e.g. Landgericht Berlin, Germany 
- The acting part of that court, by function and/or by name, e.g. 51.
Zivilkammer
- The date of the decision
- The filing number
- the type of the decision (e.g. judgement, interim decision)

Optional ones:
- related decisions, e.g. previous decisons of lower courts, later
decisions of higher courts on the same case - this is not always linear,
cases can go back an forth
- the parties
- the main legal norms that have been applied by the court
- the main subject of the case, often mentioned in form of tags, e.g.
"contract law, internet, e-commerce" or "waste disposal, environment,
dumping"
- the central theses of the decision, an enumeration of the key rulings 
- publications of the judgement, in journals or databases
- articles, books, decisions that refer to the decision

I don't really know where this might fit into your current hierarchy,
parts of "CreativeWork" seem applicable, but a lot of context is lost if
you treat a decision as a simple article.

Cheers

Michael

-- 
Michael Below <below@judiz.de>

Received on Thursday, 31 May 2012 12:22:27 UTC