Wikidata:Property proposal/court

court edit

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Generic

Done: court (P4884) (Talk and documentation)

Description	the specific court a legal case was heard/decided in
Represents	court (Q41487)
Data type	Item
Template parameter	"court" in en:template:infobox court case
Domain	legal case (Q2334719)
Example	Egan v. Canada (Q3049112) → Supreme Court of Canada (Q196615) Cho Man Kit v Broadcasting Authority (Q5103372) → Court of First Instance of the High Court (Q5178384) Jacob & Youngs, Inc. v. Kent (Q17022733) → New York Court of Appeals (Q11991268)
Planned use	adding this property to court cases already on Wikidata

Motivation edit

I was pretty shocked, as a law student, to see that there is no "court" property to identify the court a case was heard/decided in. For instance, US Supreme Court case items have instance of "United States Supreme Court decision" which lets you know the court, but I think it would make a lot more sense to also have a property of "court" so cases in any jurisdiction in the world can reference the court. ohmyerica (talk) 02:29, 19 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion edit

Support I was almost going to suggest this myself. There are a lot of British legal cases which could benefit from having a "court" parameter, and I'm rather surprised we don't have one already. Given that specific jurisdictions established and disestablished courts at specific dates, we could use that as a constraint. For instance, if you specified that the court decision was handed down before 1 October 2009 and that it was handed down by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (rather than the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords), that's highly likely to be wrong.
The only thing I can think that might be an issue is we would need to work out how to deal with the history of court proceedings. In a typical notable English criminal case, it will have been heard at the Crown Court, then appealed to the Court of Appeal, then to the Supreme Court, and potentially to the European Court of Human Rights. Do we include all four, or just the most superior court? We should probably set the superior court as the "preferred" statement about the case, and ensure they all have date qualifiers. We will probably also need some kind of human-readable guide on how to properly handle a legal case in Wikidata, with some good example items. —Tom Morris (talk) 10:09, 19 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Yes, I agree that the multiple courts issue is something to be worked out, especially when there are multiple significant decisions in a case and a bunch of courts overruling each other. It shouldn't be necessary to include literally every court it was heard in (that could get ridiculous, plus that information isn't always available), but maybe just appellate (or other non-trial level) courts which published decisions regarding that case. ohmyerica (talk) 18:48, 20 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support Also suprised that we already don't have one, as we already have a fair number of law and justice related properties.--Jklamo (talk) 13:09, 19 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose The first example given is marked up as instance of (P31) = decision of the Supreme Court of Canada (Q19930933). This seems adequate. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:16, 19 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Are we going to have a value in that vein for every court in the world? I mean, we've got "decision of the Supreme Court of Canada" and "decision of the Supreme Court of the United States". I don't think we've got the equivalent in the UK. I'm not sure that's a scalable solution. The likelihood is that we do have an existing Wikidata item for each court, though. And the knowledge about the hierarchy of appellate decisions can be stored on those pages (eventually). The nice thing about the proposed solution here is we can say that a particular case had, say, a final hearing in the Supreme Court, but before that had a decision in the Court of Appeal, and before that had a decision at trial etc. The other problem with this is a case is not just a decision: if we have a court property, we can say about that court hearing that the oral arguments occurred on a particular day, the presiding judges were whoever, the decision was handed down on a particular day, who the author of the majority and dissenting opinions were etc. —Tom Morris (talk) 10:48, 20 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support Any statements can be expressed by using instance of (P31) with a specific describing item, but appropriate property is useful with regard to computer-readability. A related problem was discussed on the Project chat. --Okkn (talk) 14:40, 19 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support David (talk) 16:20, 19 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support Good observation. Interesting to see participants from multiple domains here. John Samuel 17:27, 19 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support Definitely needed. I suggested this on an earlier property proposal regarding legal cases, as information that would be useful to record here. ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:46, 20 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I would recommend not using this for humans instead of position held (P39). It would make the data less accessible. --Yair rand (talk) 04:33, 21 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- You're right -- I've removed mentions of using this for judges. ohmyerica (talk) 02:26, 22 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  - Excellent. Support for linking legal cases to courts. --Yair rand (talk) 21:34, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Yair rand, Pigsonthewing, ArthurPSmith, ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2, Ohmyerica, Jklamo: @Tom Morris, Okkn: Done: court (P4884). − Pintoch (talk) 11:24, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]