Scope: was Re: [legalcite-markup-discuss] Draft of a charter for the Legal Citation (LegalCite) Technical Committee

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

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Chet,

Is there a reliable survey available of all the legal citation
systems, print and electronic, in use now?

Same question but including legacy legal data?

I ask because the charter reads as though in 12 to 18 months that the
TC will be proposing a universal citation model and syntax for all
legal systems.

I'm not altogether sure that a comprehensive survey of current
citation systems could be completed in 12 to 16 months. Much less the
reduction of those systems into some common model.

Targeting legal systems based on some objective measure, GDP for
example, could be used to scope the work into stages.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

On 10/29/2013 02:14 PM, Chet Ensign wrote:
> All,
> 
> I have been working on the draft for a charter for the proposed
> Legalcite Technical Committee. The draft below incorporates
> feedback from several people, especially changes to make clear that
> the scope is the markup model (conceptual model, vocabulary,
> metadata definitions and syntatical structure) not print format
> recommendations and changes to get rid of any perceived US-centric
> bias.
> 
> Please have a look and let us know what you think. We are getting
> close to the point where the charter can be formally submitted to
> OASIS and the TC started up. I anticipate - given the timeline of
> events necessary to start a Technical Committee and the impending
> holidays - that a first meeting would be set for sometime in
> January of 2014.
> 
> --- Charter draft ---
> 
> Section 1: Charter
> 
> (1)(a) TC Name
> 
> OASIS Legal Citation (Legalcite) TC
> 
> (1)(b) Statement of Purpose
> 
> One of the fundamental principles of legal writing is that every
> statement of law or fact must carry a citation to its source.
> Citations document the history of precedent that ensures the
> continuity and consistent interpretation and application of the
> law. Legal documents almost always include citations within the
> body of the text and, in fact, would be unacceptable without them.
> 
> The specifications for constructing citations that exist today vary
> across jurisdictions and languages. Work has been done on several
> initiatives to develop markup standards for citations (see list at 
> http://tinyurl.com/legalCite-DataModel) yet the focus of many
> efforts and much of the analysis has been on the form of the
> citation on the page itself. In today’s world of electronic
> publishing, online research and proliferating sources of material,
> the lack of a rich markup language vocabulary and syntax presents a
> number of problems, key among them:
> 
> 1) Print citations can't be machine-processed with 100%
> reliability, e.g. a citation may point to a page with complex text
> that requires a human reader to decipher the intended target. A
> markup standard could enable precise processing.
> 
> 2) There is no way to encode improvements in quality and accuracy
> into a citation over time so publishers and other users must
> reprocess the text citations over and over. With a markup standard,
> a publisher could enrich a citation with metadata that would
> persist, enabling many downstream applications to work on the data
> instead of re-fixing it.
> 
> 3) There is no way to encode consistent metadata behind print
> citations that may vary from one jurisdiction to the next. A markup
> standard would allow normalization and enhancement to be done in
> the tagging, leaving the print citation untouched.
> 
> 4) There is no way to enrich the citation with additional metadata
> that can assist authors, editors, or readers in using the citation.
> A markup standard could allow information to be captured beyond
> what was needed for linking.
> 
> 5) There is no support for extracting citations into databases or
> even something as simple as tables of authority. Standard markup in
> documents would allow citations to be harvested simply by
> processing the embedded tagging in the document.
> 
> A non-proprietary, royalty-free, open citation markup standard
> designed with the input of subject matter experts and focused on
> the requirements of a broad cross-section of the legal community
> can provide the foundation for creating enriched content that can
> be useful across multiple groups of interested parties. It can
> provide a basis for creating more powerful editorial and data
> handling tools for legal content. It can support the development of
> federated citation databases that help connect legal professionals
> to resources and ensure the persistence of cross-references over
> time. It can support the growth of open source legal content and 
> applications. And it can become a foundation for new products and
> services of value to everyone in the legal community.
> 
> Just as web browsers and related types of software have become core
> parts of our interactive computer environment thanks to the
> foundation of HTML, a legal citation markup standard can enable a
> new generation of tools and capabilities benefiting all players and
> allowing commercial entities to deliver new generations of products
> and services limited only by their imagination and ability to
> innovate.
> 
> Around the world, the number of officially binding electronic
> resources for legislation, case law and official documents is
> increasing. Relying solely on the printed text of citations will
> add to the cost and burden of researching and complying with
> increasingly complex legal issues. A uniform approach to legal
> citations is crucial for the long-term accessibility and 
> preservation of legal content.
> 
> (1)(c) Scope
> 
> The Legalcite TC will develop an open standard for machine-readable
> tagging of legal citations. Specifically, the standard will provide
> a conceptual model, vocabulary, metadata definitions and syntatical
> structure that:
> 
> - Enables cites to be richly tagged while leaving the visible text
> of the citation undisturbed.
> 
> - Works for a broad variety of legal content types including court
> cases, legislation, regulations, parliamentary documents and legal
> treatises.
> 
> - Supports citations as used in different countries and
> jurisdictions.
> 
> - Allows other metadata to be associated with citations for
> purposes beyond just linking.
> 
> The TC will also define use cases, overviews, sample data sets and
> such other non-normative content as can help guide implementers and
> users to develop and adopt of the standard.
> 
> Out of scope:
> 
> The TC will not specify how citations should be processed nor
> define specific tools for citations. For example, it will provide
> semantics for describing the information needed to link citations,
> but it will not specify how such linking should be implemented in
> systems.
> 
> The TC will not specify nor make assumptions about how and where in
> the lifecycle of legal materials the citation markup would be added
> to content. In particular, it will not specify or assume that
> citation markup is added during original content creation.
> 
> The TC will not specify prescriptions for citation repositories or
> for other types of implementations that could be built on the
> foundation of the standard.
> 
> (1)(d) Deliverables
> 
> The TC will produce:
> 
> 1. An open legal citation markup standard within 12 to 18 months of
> the first meeting.
> 
> 2. A list of business cases and use cases to be supported by the
> standard within 12 to 18 months of the first meeting. The list may
> include use cases regarding the treatment of legacy materials.
> 
> 3. Optionally, such other explanatory, educational or supporting
> material as the TC may choose to produce to support the overall
> standard, timing to be determined as the TC progresses.
> 
> (1)(e) IPR Mode
> 
> The TC will operate under the Non Assertion IPR mode as defined in
> the OASIS Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy effective 15
> October 2010.
> 
> (1)(f) Audience
> 
> Because citations are fundamental to the practice and application
> of the law, the audience for this work is extensive:
> 
> - Developers creating products for the legal market, including the
> open source and open government communities.
> 
> - Legal publishers and service providers
> 
> - Law librarians
> 
> - Academics, especially those with an interest in legal analytics
> 
> - Court, legislative and administrative staffs, especially those
> charged with performing research and drafting documents as well as
> government IT staff who must support them
> 
> (1)(g) Language
> 
> The TC shall carry out its activities in English.
> 
> Section 2: Additional Information
> 
> (2)(a) Identification of Similar Work
> 
> A substantial amount of work has been done on legal citations. The 
> following lists some of the more highly visible initiatives.
> 
> - The OASIS LegalDocumentML TC is based on the Akoma Ntoso ( 
> http://www.akomantoso.org/) specification produced under the
> UN/DESA’s Africa i-Parliament Action Plan. The specification
> includes a URI-based syntax for legal citations and a naming
> convention. ( 
> http://www.akomantoso.org/release-notes/akoma-ntoso-2.0-schema/naming-conventions-1)
>
>  - The IETF has published an Internet Draft titled “A Uniform
> Resource Name (URN) Namespace for Sources of Law (LEX).” The
> document provides a URN convention for “identifying, naming,
> assigning, and managing persistent resources in the legal domain.”
> ( https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-spinosa-urn-lex/)
> 
> - The Council of Ministers of the European Union have published 
> ‘Conclusions’ regarding a proposed European Case Law Identifier or
> ECLI (see http://tinyurl.com/ln3tx3l ) and a European Legislation
> Identifier or ELI (see http://tinyurl.com/cpv6hg4 )to support the
> development of a semantic web of official gazettes. ( 
> http://legalinformatics.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/st17554-en11.pdf)
>
>  - The CEN Workshop on Open XML interchange format for legal
> documents has developed CEN MetaLex, a standard for the way sources
> of law and references to sources of law are to be represented in
> XML. (http://www.metalex.eu/ ).
> 
> - The UK National Archives uses Crown Legislation Markup Language
> (CLML) to make data available over Legislation.gov.uk. ( 
> https://github.com/lewismc/clml-schemas/blob/master/CLML%20Schemas/README.txt)
>
>  - Juriconnect, is a consortium of government bodies, legal
> publishers and academia in the Netherlands produced Juriconnect
> Standard BWB (Basis Wetten Bestand) is the basis for referring to
> parts of regulations. ( 
> http://www.juriconnect.nl/downloadreg.asp?bestand=Juriconnect%5FStandaard%5FBWB%5F1%5F3%2Epdf&type=pdf)
>
>  - “PRESTO: A WWW Information Architecture for Legislation and
> Public Information Systems” by Rick Jelliffe  describes a
> methodology that governments could use to provide access to
> documents at any level of granularity, in particular legislation
> and regulations. ( 
> http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletter/news2008-02-26.html#cite7 )
> 
> In addition, much work has been done on standards for structuring
> and representing citations and much has been written on the
> problems of legal citation and how to address them. An extensive
> list of these resources can be found at
> http://tinyurl.com/legalCite-DataModel.
> 
> (2)(b) First TC Meeting
> 
> First meeting date TBD –
> 
> (2)(c) Ongoing Meeting Schedule
> 
> (2)(d) TC Proposers
> 
> Richard Beatch (rbeatch@bloomberg.net), Bloomberg LP James Cabral
> (jcabral@mtgmc.com ), MTG Management Consultants, LLC Ken Hirsh
> (ken.hirsh@uc.edu ), American Association of Law Libraries John
> Joergensen (jjoerg@andromeda.rutgers.edu ) Rutgers School of Law 
> Laurel Shifrin (laurel.shifrin@lexisnexis.com), LexisNexis Monica
> Palmirani (monica.palmirani@unibo.it), University of
> Bologna-CIRSFID
> 
> (2)(e) Primary Representatives' Support
> 
> 
> (2)(f) TC Convener
> 
> The TC will be convened by John Joergensen of the Rutgers School of
> Law – Newark.
> 
> (2)(g) OASIS Member Section
> 
> The TC intends to request affiliation with the OASIS LegalXML
> Member Section.
> 
> 

- -- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Technical Advisory Board, OASIS (TAB)
Former Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
Twitter: patrickDurusau
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