overview

Approach to the OAI4courts standard

Strategy

All metadata standards are compromises between completeness and accuracy of representation (on one hand) and ease of formulation and implementation on the other. Gathering support for any particular standard or set of standards requires momentum that can easily be lost in debate over minutiae. There is a built-in tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good, when what is need are functional standards that are designed not to stand in the way of their own refinement at some later time.

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Guided tour of Layer 1 prototype

What's here

[NB: this is a guided tour of an experimental service. It bounces around a lot, so if it's not working for you, try again. Frustration at repeated, unsuccessful attempts can be vented at the author, tom-dot-bruce[somewhere in the vicinity of]cornell-dot-edu]

This "guided tour" will walk you through the prototype OAI repository server at the Legal Information Institute. It includes a little bit of explanatory text, but

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DOTDMS page types

Layer two overview: Cases, Orders, Opinions, Decisions and Writings

Terminology

The words "decision", "order", "opinion", and "judgment", and even "case" tend to be used both loosely and interchangeably to mean either the act that delivers a court's ruling in a particular case, or the text of the ruling itself.  To make things even more confusing, a decision (in either sense) may affect (either dispositively or nondispositively) more than one case, and a decision (in the sense of the text that records the court's ruling) may consist of more than one document.

For our purposes here:

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oai4courts layer two element descriptions

This page is an index of overview documents that describe, non-technically, different classes of element found in Layer 2 of the oai4courts caselaw metadata standard.  They provide descriptions of the different logical entities described by the oai4courts Layer 2 elements, as well as pointers to each.

Note that these are intended for use in caselaw metadata (as opposed to caselaw markup), but some of the thinking involved applies to both.

Element classes

Overview descriptions exist for:

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oai4courts layer two overview: Writings

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.

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oai4courts layer two overview: Dates

[[ 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:

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