Italian citations patterns from the High Court of Cassation database analysis

[monica.palmirani <monica.palmirani@unibo.it>]

Italian Scenario of High Court of Cassation - Legislative database analysis

Italian High Court of Cassation Database is the oldest legislative 
database in Italy.
High Court of Cassation in Italy is the last level in the judiciary 
system [1].
For historical reasons the database was settled in 1968, thanks to two 
innovative judges (Borruso and Novelli) and nowadays it includes more 
than 1.000.000 of legislative documents. It is the best and largest 
public database of legislation sources in Italy. It includes law, 
decree, agreement, secondary law, treaty, ordinance, deliberation, 
communications, regulation, agency legal notes, errata, etc.
The most relevant set of documents are the ministerial decree (from 
executive): 9486.
In Italy we have two kinds of Ministerial Decree: numbered and non-numbered.
For the non-numbered Ministerial Decree the date of the document is not 
unique.
In the same date the same Ministry delivers several decrees [2].

Since 2005 the High Court of Cassation has been started to markup 
legislative documents in XML (managing also the old documents).
The standard adopted was NormeInRete DTD and later XSD (Italian XML 
standard, the ancestor of Akoma Ntoso).
The project started thanks to some very innovative judges, with the 
support of University of Bologna - CIRSFID - and 3D Informatica company.
All the database of the Italian legislation in the High Court of 
Cassation is in XML NormeInRete (documents from 1930 to today).
Now we are migrating all the database from NIR to Akoma Ntoso without 
any problem.
At contrary we have more metadata elements in AKN for expressing odd 
modifications (e.g., renumbering), point-in-time, annexes, 
documentComponent.

We (CIRSFID ) have conducted a research in the last months (thanks also 
to the LegalCiteM requests) on the normative references and the related 
textual citations.
We have analysed all the documents published in the Official Gazette [3] 
in the period 2008-2009-2010 in order to detect patterns in the textual 
citations AND patterns in the identifications information (how the 
document is officially named in the preface).
We have analysed 13.871 documents for a total of 144.637 normative 
references.

The documents were annotated by legal person using an interactive parser 
editor (Norma-Editor) produced by CIRSFID-UNIBO and each normative 
reference was checked by another legal expert, manually, and checked by 
several judges (end-users).

We have found around 6000 variants of template of normative references 
(including linguistic variation and punctuations).
We have grouped these templates in the following patterns (eliding the 
linguistic prepositions - del, il, etc.- punctuations - ,;, - order of 
the elements - partition/fragment):
{doctype} {date_d}{number_d}  - approximately 54,00% (e.g., legge dell'8 
luglio 2015, n. 4 - act, at 8 July 2015, n. 4)
{doctype} {date_d} (e.g., DPCM dell'8 luglio 2015 - Decree of the 
President of Council of Ministers, at July 8, 2015)
{doctype} {number_d} (e.g., Ordinanza 45 - Ordinance 45,)
{doctype} {authority}{date_d} (e.g., Decreto del Ministero della 
Giustizia dell'8 luglio 2015 - Decree of the Minister of Justice, at 
July 8, 2015)
{doctype} {authority}{number_d} (e.g., Decreto del Ministero della 
Giustizia, n. 4 - Decree of the Minister of Justice, n. 4)
{doctype} {authority}{number_d}{date_d}  (e.g., Decreto del Ministero 
della Giustizia, n. 4, dell'8 luglio 2015 - Decree of the Minister of 
Justice, n. 4, at July 8, 2015)

{partition}{doctype} {date_d}{number_d} (e.g., art.3, legge dell'8 
luglio 2015, n. 4 - art. 3, act, at 8 July 2015, n. 4)

Some other variants are possible with more specification of Department, 
Agency, sub-authority, etc.:
{doctype} {authority}+{date_d}
{doctype} {authority}+{number_d}
{doctype} {authority}+{number_d}{date_d}

Other methods are possible especially using title, abbreviation, acronym:
{title} {date_d} (legge di stabilita' 2015 [4] )
{title} (legge di stabilita')
{abbreviation} {date_d}
{abbreviation}  (codice civile - civil code - c.c.)

Unfortunately some of the previous citations produce an not unique 
identifier of the digital source:
{doctype} {date_d} - at the same date we have different documents (e.g., 
Ministerial Decree)
{doctype} {number_d} - same number in different years  (e.g., Decreto-legge)
{doctype} {authority}{date_d} - idem
{doctype} {authority}{number_d} -idem

Yours,
Monica

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_Cassation_(Italy)
[2] 
http://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/gazzetta/serie_generale/caricaDettaglio?dataPubblicazioneGazzetta=2015-07-07&numeroGazzetta=155
[3] 
http://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/archivioCompleto;jsessionid=PVKucBY6UPajqctRfxXWng__.ntc-as5-guri2b
[4] http://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/id/2014/12/29/14G00203/sg

--
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Associate professor of Legal Informatics
School of Law
Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
C.I.R.S.F.I.D.http://www.cirsfid.unibo.it/  
Palazzo Dal Monte Gaudenzi - Via Galliera, 3
I - 40121 BOLOGNA (ITALY)
Tel +39 051 277217
Fax +39 051 260782
E-mailmonica.palmirani@unibo.it  
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