caselaw

Attached is a DTD that I developed in 1999-2000 for use with US Courts of Appeal opinions. The idea was to implement this as part of Emory Law School's 11th circuit collection. It was never implemented.

Not that things have to or even ought to be done this way, but I wanted to just post some thoughts I have been having about markup and get them out there.

Jurisdiction: Should be presented like this in this order: 1.Country, 2.Jurisdictional Subdivision, 3.Court name, 4.Location.

Presented in this order, with just this order of priority, item 4 to be optional.

If it is done this way, everything will sort out.

Citation formats are an odd sort of thing: people have very different expectations as

Overview

oai4courts layer two is intended to be a "working" schema adequate to represent most caselaw metadata using OAI-PMH.  The approaches taken will also be useful to other caselaw-metadata efforts (for example, metadata that is embedded in case files themselves).  Its place in the overall plan for developing the oai4courts metadata standard is documented here.

Elements vs. attributes

How do we choose between 

<element myattrib="foo"/>

and 

Court practice

Some courts publish decisions as a single document that contains all of the opinions (majority, concurrences, dissents) that comprise the decision.  Others issue the opinions in different writings. The challenge is to contrive a model that is equally useful in either situation.

[merely a stub]

Court names and identifiers

Jurisdiction

Geographical

Subject-matter

Relationship with other courts

[[ NB: if you're looking for systems to use in marking up dates in judicial opinions, you might take a look at 

Dates are a surprisingly complicated topic, with many subtleties and variations.  That is because almost any milestone in the process of hearing the case and carrying out its resolution can have a date associated with it, as can any of the documents generated along the way.  Every case will have a date of decision.  Most appellate cases will have an argument or hearing date.  Beyond that the varieties are practically infinite:

General notes

[nb.: if you're here looking for sane approaches to marking up names in judicial opinions, or in general, take a look at the relevant sections of TEI ]

(mostly a stub for now)

Parties

Representatives (lawyers)

Judges

Authors