standards

Here are some "worked examples" of URN:lex identifiers, to act as a guide for those implementing URN:lex on their sites. Discussion of this topic is taking place here.

United States

Federal law

Legislation

United States Code (per the Legal Information Institute):

For now, we are implementing US Code URNs inside <meta> tags, along the lines of the following example:

URN:lex is a proposed Internet standard for legal document identifiers written by Pierluigi Spinosa, Enrico Francesconi, and Caterina Lupo.  It is intended to coexist with (and provide important infrastructure for) more semantically-laden approaches like LegisLink and Citability.

The URN:lex proposal is here.

The following was written (by Dave Shetland and Tom Bruce)  as a position statement for the Workshop on Legislative XML associated with the 2007 JURIX conference in Leiden:

The law.gov workshop held by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School on March 22 and 23, 2010, produced some general recommendations regarding legislative metadata.  They are best imagined as a series of answers to a question from a revisor of statutes or other governmental publisher of statutes or regulations who is asking, "What should I do?".

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.