caselaw

Background

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.

[this is mostly a placeholder for now -- unedited notes follow]

Here's what we have in mind:

oai_lii:law.cornell.edu:us/federal/scotus/00-201-ZO-html

This example is the identifier for the majority opinion in NY Times v. Tasini. It breaks into
scheme:namespace-identifier:local-identifier

-- the scheme oai_lii should be the same for all identifiers, everywhere, and will eventually
be associated with a series of standards documents and formal xml schemas.

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

Citer is a project under development at the Legal Information Institute (project details).

You will also want to look at the conceptual overview of Level 1 data.

Here's a schema diagram. It won't print well, sadly. There's a PDF version that might be more readable: OAI-lite.pdf

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.

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

Where does this fit?

Level One is the first metadata schema implemented in OAI4Courts, and corresponds to the mandatory unqualified Dublin Core schema required by OAI-PMH.