Legislation, Constitutions, Treaties, and Parliamentary Documents Requirements and Use

Legislation, Constitutions, Treaties, and Parliamentary Documents Requirements and Use Cases Version 1.0

Working Draft 01

05 May 2015

Technical Committee:

OASIS Legal Citation Markup (LegalCiteM) TC

Chairs:

John Joergensen (), Rutgers University School of Law

Fabio Vitali (), University of Bologna-CIRSFID

Editors:

Monica Palmirani (), University of Bologna-CIRSFID

Melanie Knapp (), George Mason University Law Library

John Dann (), Chargé de direction adjoint at Ministère d'Etat - Service central de législation

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Abstract:

Summary of the technical purpose of the document.

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Table of Contents

1 Introduction 5

1.1 Terminology 5

1.2 Normative References 5

1.3 Non-Normative References 5

2 Introduction 6

2.1 Goal of the document 6

2.2 Scenario 6

2.3 Objectives 7

3 Type of documents 8

4 Type of citations 9

4.1 Dynamic citations 9

4.2 Static citations 9

4.3 Internal citations 9

4.4 Multiple citations 9

4.4.1 Range citations 9

4.4.2 List of citations 9

4.5 Explicit citations 9

4.6 Incomplete citations 9

4.7 Implicit citations 9

4.8 Linguistic variant of the citations 9

5 Common End-User Requirements 10

5.1 Flexibility 10

5.2 Usability 10

5.3 Human Readible 11

5.4 Interoperability 11

5.4.1 Multilinguism 11

5.4.2 Alias 12

5.4.3 Fragment citation 12

5.4.4 Meta Data 12

5.5 Legal Expert Requirements 13

5.5.1 Versioning and Consolidation over time 13

5.5.2 Variants and Translation 13

5.5.3 Errata corrige 13

5.5.4 Annulment and Retroactive Modifications 14

5.5.5 Sovereign 14

5.5.6 Jurisdiction 15

5.5.7 Document Component, Components and Annexes 15

5.6 Archivial Requirements 15

5.6.1 Open vocabulary 15

5.6.2 Authenticity 16

5.6.3 Provenance 16

6 Existing pilot cases 18

6.1 ELI 18

6.1.1 Luxembourg pilot case 18

6.1.1.1 URI Structures are based on how users cite legislation 20

6.1.1.2 Use case for Constitutional Court 20

6.1.2 France pilot case 21

6.1.3 UK pilot case 21

6.2 US GPO 25

6.2.1 Types of documents and their citation 25

6.2.2 Secondary legislative documents issued by the federal legislature are: 26

6.2.3 Use case 1: United States Constitution 26

6.2.4 Cornell LII 27

6.2.4.1 Use case 2: United States Code, 18 U.S.C. § 924 27

6.2.5 GPO 27

6.2.6 Cornell LII 28

6.2.6.1 Use case 3: Public Law, Pub. L. No. 113-1 28

6.2.6.2 Use case 4: Private Law, Priv. L. No. 112-1 28

6.3 URN:LEX 28

6.3.1 Italian Project 29

6.3.2 LexML Brazil Project 29

6.4 Zotero for legislative resources 29

6.5 LLL – US Code 30

6.6 Akoma Ntoso 31

7 Conformance 32

Appendix A. Acknowledgments 33

Appendix B. Example Title 34

B.1 ELI Material 34

B.1.1 Akoma Ntoso Material 34

B.1.1.1 Sub-sub-subsidiary section 34

Appendix C. Revision History 35

legislation-reqs-v1.0-wd01 Working Draft 01 05 May 2015

1 Introduction

[All text is normative unless otherwise labeled]

1.1 Terminology

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

1.2 Normative References

[RFC2119] Bradner, S., “Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels”, BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt.

Reference] ion]

1.3 Non-Normative References

Reference] ion]

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NOTE: The proper format for citation of technical work produced by an OASIS TC (whether Standards Track or Non-Standards Track) is:

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2 Introduction

2.1 Goal of the document

This document is the summary of the outcomes of the LegalCiteM – Legislation, Treaty, Constitution (LLTC) sub committee of the main LegalCiteM OASIS Technical Committee. This sub committee has the goal to analyze different normative references concerning legislation, treaties, constitutions in order to define the fundamental elements able to represent in unique manner of the legal resources in the Web and on so to use it also for representing the legal citations inside of the legal texts. The LLTC collects use cases among different legal traditions, countries, languages, standards and it summarizes the main requirements in the domain for favoring the work of the technical specifications definition in the Technical sub committee.

The pilot cases collected are the follow: ELI from France and UK; URN:LEX from Brazil and Italy; Akoma Ntoso from different countries; GPO (USA); Cornell University LII annotation; LEGISLATIVE LOOKUP & LINKING (LLL); Library of Congress annotation.

2.2 Scenario

All countries are based on the national rule of law, legal system and government tradition, rule of procedure in the legislative system and all of them have publication regulation for permitting the public access to the legal sources. The public access to the legal sources is a democratic principle for permitting to the citizens to access, to know, to apply the commands and the rights. It is also prodromic to participate in the governance of a country. The legislative citation is part of this national legal culture and for this reason it is important to have in mind a flexible mechanism that is able to be close to the national law system.

Most of the deliberative bodies or publication institutions have extensive Web sites (government gazette, official gazette, official journal, official newspaper, official diary or any other authorial publication instrument), for editing and communicating legislation documents to the general public and businesses in authorial and authentically format. The process of cooperation at the international level has increased the need to identify and exchange legislation documents especially if they are authentic, official and delivered by empowered authority.

This need is partially met by the digitalization of legislation documents and the widespread use of the Internet. However, the use of legal documents is greatly limited by the differences that exist in the various legal systems and in the way in which relevant documenters are organized and classified or stored in technical systems. It is even further hampered by the amount of legal data available.

Citation and exchange of legislation documents across borders and across different systems, and in particular data relating to international, regional (e.g. Pan-African Parliament, Mercosur), European or national legislation would be very useful to all. In order to facilitate the further development of interlinked legal data and to serve legal professionals and citizens, we are missing some of the most basic building blocks for interoperability in order to share, cite and link legal data. Benefiting from the emerging architecture of the semantic web and Linked Open Data, this solution would allow a greater and faster exchange of data by enabling an automatic and efficient exchange of information. It would also allow humans and machines to have an improved access to Governments’ legislation, allowing easy referencing, understanding the meaning of the information processed, downloading, analyzing, re-using and interconnecting different information and sources across domains.

This Constructing common building blocks for naming and citing legislation documents, with additional structured metadata, that are sufficiently standardized and flexible and that respect each countries unique legislative and legal tradition, would be feasible. It should also take in consideration that this should be a cost-effective implementation on top of existing IT solutions or databases, and it should be designed to work seamlessly on top of existing systems.

2.3 Objectives

The Legal normative citation topic involve three main aspects strictly correlated:

identifier: the univocal, but not necessarily unique, name of the legal resource, persistent, meaningful, easy for the end-user to use, connected with the main semantic metadata of the legal resource in order to qualify the legal text and to understand the provenance;
reference: the machine-readable representation of the textual citation of a legal source able to retrieve the legal source over time;
metadata: the metadata set that can qualify the legal source. They can enrich the reference for helping the dereferencing or the retrieval of the legal sources.

A good construction of the identifier permits to use a correct reference model for detecting the normative source cited in the text, also when it evolve over time or it is expressed in different linguistic variants. The reference is able to create the correct input for the dereferencing mechanism managed by different application levels (e.g., resolver, metadata database, etc.).

The objectives of this document is to indentify the main neutral requirements that an identifier of legislative sources should have in order to facilitate the building of the appropriate reference starting from a textual citation and the nature of the legal document.

An example of identifier is:

Primary URI
Alias

An example of reference is:

Citation in the text
Reference

An example of metadata is:

Document
metadata

3 Type of documents

The LegalCiteM "Legislation, Constitutions, Treaties and Parliamentary" documents subcommittee collected some use cases coming from different legal systems and related to different types of document (e.g. act, constitution, bill, treaty, etc.).

The types of document in charge of this sub-committee are:

· constitution: constitutive legal document of a legal system;

· act: legislative document approved by the proper authority. This category includes all the type of primary law: legislative decree, urgent decree, president regulation, federated state acts, regional act, etc.;

· bill: legislative document in draft version and under discussion in the deliberative assembly (e.g. parliament, assembly, congress, etc.);

· European law documents: directive, regulation, decision;

· treaty: international or regional treaty;

· code: codified collection of acts e.g. U.S. Code, including Positive Law and Private Law or Civil Code of Italy;

· consolidated act: updated version of an act e.g. Classified Compilation of Federal Legislation;

· amendment: document that propose modifications to a bill;

· collection of amendments: report of the amendments;

· consolidated amendments: entire bill proposed as an amendment;

· gazette: collection of acts, bills, etc. published in Official Gazette or Journal, Statutes at Large, etc..

4 Type of citations

In the legislation document we find different kind of citation or normative references that need to be managed by the naming convention of citation standard.

4.1 Dynamic citations

The major part of the normative references are dynamic and follow the link according to the evolution of the law over time. We need to manage easily this requirement in order to point out exactly to the updated version of legislative document.

4.2 Static citations

In some cases the citations are static and they must point out to a specific

4.3 Internal citations

4.4 Multiple citations

4.4.1 Range citations

4.4.2 List of citations

4.5 Explicit citations

4.6 Incomplete citations

4.7 Implicit citations

4.8 Linguistic variant of the citations

In some legal system, like the European Law, it is relevant to manage also the references in different languages.

5 Common End-User Requirements

5.1 Flexibility

Definition

In line with the principle of proportionality and the principle of decentralization, each country and company should continue to operate its own national Parliament legal information system or Official Journals and Legal Gazettes or legal databases in the way they prefer. We should therefore construct carefully a system to cite and identify legislation in order to respect the legal and constitutional differences between countries. The trade-off for this flexibility is that implementing such a solution requires a degree of judgment, thought and experience and that we agree and accept that there will be some differences in the solutions found by different countries or entities.