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Subject: Re: [legaldocml] Bills and Acts


Dear Grant, 

> For me, there are four broad categories of legislative output and similar output from related but non-legislative agencies. I can see how to handle two of these categories (1 & 3 below), but not the other two.  The four categories are:
>  
> 1) Proposed Law. These documents become law upon approval. Proper bills, initiatives, propositions, and US joint resolutions are all examples. Broadly categorizing them all as an abstract notion of a bill is acceptable to me - but with a clear mapping to local terminology.

The Document Type Formerly Known as Bill (DTFKB) 

> 2) Statements and Opinions. These documents do not become law upon approval. This includes most types of resolutions including, but not limited to, constitutional amendments. Commendatory or commemorative resolutions are other more obvious examples. They will recognize a person's accomplishments or an important event in history, but they don't change the law for anyone. These are not bills! They need a term that does not imply they become law.

Amendments have their own document type, amendment. All the others do not have neither a specific structural pattern, nor a shared category, therefore the document type "doc" would seem the best choice. 

> 3) Enacted Law: These are the law. Acts, "positive law" codes, ordinances, regulations, and constitutions are examples. I suppose that proclaimed law such as executive orders and decrees will also fall into this category too. Of course, there will be a good dose of controversy as to the validity of these documents, but that is not for us to debate. Broadly categorizing all of these documents as an abstract notion of acts is acceptable to me - but only with a clear mapping to local terminology.

DTFKA

> 4) Informative classifications or compilations of the law: These are evidence of the law, but are not law. The obvious example are the non-positive titles of the US Code. These documents have never been enacted and are not acts. In fact, I don't believe that the non-positive titles of the US Code are subject to any scrutiny by Congress itself. They're simply the output of the Law Revision Counsel. They're an index of sorts. I believe that some jurisdictions build documents that consolidate amendments to produce a new informative, but not authoritative, document. I would guess that this document would also fall within this category as it is not enacted.

The US Code, inasmuch as it is a collection of Sections, is a documentCollection. Each individual Title of the Code has the same nature and structure as the others, and contain (a possibly reorganized form of) enacted norms. There is little doubts that positive titles are DTFKA, and therefore all titles should be DTFKAs. The fact tha some are positive and some are not has no impact on neither their content, nor their structure, but only on the authorship of the corresponding work and expression. 

Consider the differences between Statute X, and Title Z of the US Code. 

Statute X was enacted on date T1, and modified by Statute Y, entering in force on date T2. Both versions were converted into XML by Grant on dates T3 and T4, respectively. Grant also determined the content of the new version by applying modification specification of Y onto the first version of X.
* The first version of X has the following identification characteristics: 
  Work: 
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T1/X
	FRBRcountry: US
	FRBRsubtype: statute
	FRBRauthor: #legislator (or #congress), 
	FRBRdate: T1
  Expression
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T1/X@
	FRBRauthor: #legislator (or #congress), 
	FRBRdate: T1
  Manifestation: 
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T1/X@.akn
	FRBRauthor: #grantvergottini (or #xcential), 
	FRBRdate: T3
	FRBRformat: akn
  References:
	original: X

* The second version of X has the following identification characteristics: 
  Work: 
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T1/X
	FRBRcountry: US
	FRBRsubtype: statute
	FRBRauthor: #legislator (or #congress), 
	FRBRdate: T1
  Expression
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T1/X@T2
	FRBRauthor: #grantvergottini (or #xcential), 
	FRBRdate: T2
  Manifestation: 
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T1/X@T2.akn
	FRBRauthor: #grantvergottini (or #xcential), 
	FRBRdate: T4
	FRBRformat: akn
  References:
	original: X
	passiveRef: Y

On the other hand, Code Z was created by OLRC out of statute S on date T5, which was modified by Statute T, entering in force on date T6. Both versions were converted into XML by Grant on dates T7 and T8, respectively. OLRC also determined the content of the new version by applying modification specification of statute T onto statute S. 
* The first version of Z has the following identification characteristics: 
  Work: 
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T5/Z
	FRBRcountry: US
	FRBRsubtype: Title of Code
	FRBRauthor: #olrc, 
	FRBRdate: T5
  Expression
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T5/Z@
	FRBRauthor: #olrc, 
	FRBRdate: T5
  Manifestation: 
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T5/Z@.akn
	FRBRauthor: #grantvergottini (or #xcential), 
	FRBRdate: T7
	FRBRformat: akn
  References:
	original: S

* The second version of Z has the following identification characteristics: 
  Work: 
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T5/Z
	FRBRcountry: US
	FRBRsubtype: Title of Code
	FRBRauthor: #olrc, 
	FRBRdate: T5
  Expression
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T5/Z@T6
	FRBRauthor: #olrc, 
	FRBRdate: T6
  Manifestation: 
	FRBRuri: /us/act/T5/Z@T6.akn
	FRBRauthor: #grantvergottini (or #xcential), 
	FRBRdate: T8
	FRBRformat: akn
  References:
	original: S
	passiveRef: T

These are the main differences: while in a positive act (such as statute X) the author of the work is the emanating authority (e.g., the Congress), in a non-positive document the author of the work is the publishing organization (in this case, the OLRC). Furthermore, while a positive act has its origin in itself (its enactment caused its own existence), a non positive document owes its origin to a different document (and therefore original is itself for Statute X and is Statute S for the Code Title.  Everything else is exactly the same. 

It is also interesting to point out that subsequent versions of both positive and non-positive documents behave in exactly the same way: the Work data never changes, and the Expression data, in both cases, shyly confess that the content of the document is an editorial construct by someone that is not the Legislator, and specify in a passiveRef the (positive) document containing the specifications of the modifications. 

> I am of the opinion that all four categories need to be treated distinctly in order that a system may correctly interpret how these documents relate to law without having to understand localized meaning. For instance, a constitutional amendment reads as an amendment to the constitution. In fact, it looks quite a bit like a normal bill. But upon passage, it does not change the constitution. It is a recommendation to the people only. In the somewhat unlikely event that the proposition that results passes a general election, only then will the constitution change. How can a system, without any special knowledge of local terminology, understand that the amendments contained with a constitutional amendment do not apply despite passage of the document?

Because, let me stress this a lot, the end time of a DTFKB and the moment in which the chrysalis becomes a full butterfly is NOT necessarily the final passage by the congress, but the moment in which the document enters into the legal system. Akoma Ntoso distinguishes between the moment in which the act enters in force (enactment?) and the moment in which its norms have an effect on the citizens (validity?). The enactment is the moment in which the act appears as a member of the legal system. Regardless of whether it is actually active, the document cannot be changed anymore by amendments of the congress, but requires a document of the same strength (e.g., another act) to e modified, hereby creating a new version of the same document. 

In the case of the constitutional amendment, therefore, there can be only two situations (I am not a scholar in these matter, so I don't know, but I know there is no third way): 
1) the constitutional amendment exists in the legal system as soon as it is passed by the congress, although in a not-yet-valid state (which means that it requires another constitutional amendment to be further modified, and can be referred to by other legislative documents), in which case the passage of congress is also the moment in which the bills stops existing and the act starts; or
2) the constitutional amendment does not yet exist in the legal system despite having been passed by the congress, and will exist only once the referendum results have been accounted and some authority (e.g. the President?) has determined the official enactment date.

This is a frequent occurrence, for instance, in Switzerland, where every act can be subject to a people referendum, so that after passage there is a time interval where signatures can be collected to ask for a referendum. If no referendum is requested, then after the expiry date of the referendum request the bill silently becomes act, otherwise the document is maintained as a bill for as long as it takes to hold the referendum, count the votes and declare the referendum successful, and only after that there is an official enactment date where the bill transforms into an act.   

> Secondly, I believe that there needs to be a simple and clear way to map familiar local terminology into the tags used by Akoma Ntoso. You might be tempted to refer to "normative" tags and developing ontologies or taxonomies that map into them in some elegant fashion, but that is going to fly over the heads of the people most resistant to the use of abstract terminology. The solution must be obvious to someone whose focus is a day-to-day job within a single legislature.

I am very skeptical that by ADDING terminology as to authoritativeness and normativeness of documents we obtain something useful. I strongly believe that the whole matter of authoritativeness must remain orthogonal to the structure of the document, and not impact on the choice of tags and elements. It is a matter of the ontological infrastructure dominating its metadata, and not of the markup structure of the content. 

I can be much more boring than this on this very subject. For instance, we could start discussing the ontological nature of an Italian Law Decree, which is an executive act promulgated for reasons of urgency and necessity by the government on behalf and in anticipation of an actual act of the Parliament, and which MUST be later approved and promulgated as an actual Act by the Parliament, failing which the Law Decree has never existed and its effect disappear ex tunc, i.e. from the very beginning of its emanation by the government. This is a situation we can easily deal with in AKoma Ntoso. Non-positive titles of the US Code or acts subject to referendum give me no fear. 

Ciao

Fabio

--
 
>  
> Thanks for taking the time for hearing my concern,
>  
> -Grant
>  
> 
> 
> On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 6:43 AM, Thomas R. Bruce <tom@liicornell.org> wrote:
> On 2/7/13 6:31 PM, monica.palmirani wrote:
>> Dear Grant,
>> [snip]
>> 
>> 
>> So we decided in AKOMA to use a different approach: to use neutral categories coming from the theory of law and not from a list of document nomenclature, list that each country could interpreted in different way. Example: US uses "bill" with a particular meaning in a such particular step of the process, but in Australia bill has a different meaning, and also in California bill is different respect House of Representative bill, and in UK the same, without to speak in Italy (we have several different bills: from government, from parliament, from people, from regions). 
>> 
>> So let me start on the fact that we used more abstract categories coming from the theory of law: LAW, ACT and BILL (uppercase) belong to general theory of law definitions in this sense and not represent "the bill" "the act" as concrete document in a country tradition.
>>   
> Monica:
> 
> Sorry, but I must agree with Grant on this matter -- to the point of insistence.  This is not a philosophical point; it's a pragmatic     political issue.  The people that we wish to adopt AkomaNtoso need to find it recognizable. You may argue all you want that you have,     for sound reasons, chosen a single term to serve as an abstraction covering many.  But if they hear something used generally for which there is a specific meaning, they will doubt your expertise and the soundness of the standard.  To them, it sounds as though you're pointing at a cow and telling them it's a chair, when in fact you've chosen "chair" to mean "all things beginning with the letter c".
> 
> That is particularly so when you jump branches. Grant has a horror of referring to resolutions as "bills";  I suspect it will be even     worse if you refer to an executive branch document like a proposed rule (regulation) or an ANPRM (advance notice of proposed rulemaking) as a "bill".
> 
> Put another way, all the arguments that have led you to allow localization of the names of nested elements for text structure (parts, sections, chapters, etc) apply to this as well.
> 
> I believe it needs to be fixed, not as an intellectual matter, but as a matter of credibility with the people we are trying to persuade to use the standard.
> 
> All  the best,
> Tb.
> -- 
> +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
> Thomas R. Bruce
> Director, Legal Information Institute
> Cornell Law School
> 
> http://www.law.cornell.edu
> 
> twitter: @trbruce
> +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> ____________________________________________________________________
> Grant Vergottini
> Xcential Group, LLC.
> email: grant.vergottini@xcential.com
> phone: 858.361.6738



--

Fabio Vitali                            Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly,
Dept. of Computer Science        Man got to sit and wonder "Why, why, why?'
Univ. of Bologna  ITALY               Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land,
phone:  +39 051 2094872              Man got to tell himself he understand.
e-mail: fabio@cs.unibo.it         Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), "Cat's cradle"
http://vitali.web.cs.unibo.it/






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