Wikidata talk:WikiProject Law

Swedish court decisions

Don't know if this project is active, but thought I'd share some developments.

I'm working on a project to get decisions from the Swedish Supreme Court onto Wikidata. Ultimate goal is to support analysis on how the justices are voting, who is dissenting etc., but also how academic sources and other less obvious sources of legal reasoning are used. It could also be used to find the most influential cases in some areas. Any thoughts on the proposed modelling are very welcome. Belteshassar (talk) 09:58, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Is it necessary to split the publication Nytt juridiskt arkiv (Q10604998) into separate items for each part and volume? Scholia can show all the decisions at once if everything is published in the one publication item, but at the moment it can only show one year at a time like this: https://scholia.toolforge.org/venue/Q97501702 Lexpaedia (talk) 13:32, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Potential split of defendant (P1591)

In the work mentioned above I am struggling with the property defendant (P1591). In Swedish there is no word that can include both the respondent in a civil case as well as the person prosecuted in a criminal case. I wonder if this problem comes up in other legal traditions as well and if it therefore would make sense to split the property into respondent and defendant. Thoughts? I realize this could require changes to many US Supreme Court cases so I want to get your views on this. Belteshassar (talk) 10:05, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes, you can distinguish the two properties because even in the common law world, defendant is the term used in criminal cases whilst respondent is used in civil cases and in appeals. For appellate decisions such as in the US Supreme Court, the name of the case would be the Appellant v Respondent, where the Respondent is the party which won the trial, and not necessarily the respondent/defendant to the original claim or prosecution. As such, I don't think respondent/defendant would be a very useful property for US Supreme Court cases, and has potential to mislead. --Lexpaedia (talk) 13:01, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Those titles get confusing, at least under American law, the title would depend on the particular action being brought. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but if you want to Appeal your case to the US Supreme Court, then you must petition through a writ of certiorari, making you the petitioner, and the opposing party the respondent. Then, if your writ is granted, you may bring an appeal. If you bring your appeal, you’re the appellee and the opposing party is the appellant. I think it’s a good idea to have the correct statement for each one. EthanRobertLee (talk) 17:45, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Model items

Do we have a repository of model item candidates for law-related classes such as law (Q7748) and legislation (Q49371)? When looking for subclasses of command (Q1665268), I was surprised to find Miranda warning (Q312199) in the list, and decided to give it a touch-up, which eventually required fixing a few other items as well. I'm not saying it's finished yet, but I added several qualifiers and references to fill in apparent gaps, and now I would like to know if I have overlooked something (I haven't worked on the external identifiers as I'm unfamiliar with most of them, nor the labels or descriptions except for the English ones). I may even be mistaken about the proper scope of the item, such as to what extent it should relate to non-US legislation. --SM5POR (talk) 20:38, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Legal act

statute (Q820655)	is different from (P1889)	legislation (Q49371)	😒
statute (Q820655)	is different from (P1889)	legal act (Q740464)	😞
statute (Q820655)	is different from (P1889)	legal act (Q1864008)	😧
legal act (Q740464)	is different from (P1889)	legal act (Q1864008)	😫

Me like... Not! Do we really have too few words to discuss law? --SM5POR (talk) 01:28, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Haha! But WD items aren't really words, they are just labelled with them (except for WD:LEX, that is). Arlo Barnes (talk) 16:35, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Import a set of 28K items of Brazilian legislation into Wikidata

EthanRobertLee Iwan.Aucamp Wallacegromit1 (talk) 08:30, 18 July 2020 (UTC), focus on historical and international law/legislation
Belteshassar Popperipopp Ainali Lore.Mazza34 Yupik El Dubs c960657 Maxime Cavernia Copystar

Notified participants of WikiProject Law

Hello, all, I proposed an upload of 28K of items about the Brazilian legislation as part of a project at Wikicite/grant/Brazilian Laws: Modeling the Brazilian legislation in Wikidata. The idea is to model the information and document the process fully so facilitates the process of bringing law datasets to Wikidata. If you all can give me some feedback, would be great! Good contributions, Ederporto (talk) 00:13, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Properties for UK Parliamentary Papers

The UK parliament has tens of thousands of "papers", which all have a numbering based on the house (HC or HL), session (for example 1857, or 1857 Sess 2.), and a session number within that parliamentary session. Similarly bills have their own sequence of session numbers. There are also "Command Papers", which have a separate numbering system with various prefixes over time and don't reset every session.

For example, White Paper of 1939 (Q1501775) is like "Cmd. 6019", and this is a table of the papers in the 1857 Sess 2. session.

How should these numbers be captured at Wikidata? Inductiveload (talk) 09:23, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Here are some ideas Wikidata:WikiProject Sweden/Swedish Riksdag documents Lexpaedia (talk) 13:14, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Should there be an "amends" property?

When dealing with repeals we have a pair of inverse properties repeals (P3148) and repealed by (P2568); but for amendments we have the property amended by (P2567) with no inverse "amends" property. Should there be one? Would a proposal to create it be welcomed? - Htonl (talk) 20:42, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Yes. EthanRobertLee (talk) 19:21, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Glad you agree. If there's no other comment perhaps I should go ahead and prepare a proposal. - Htonl (talk) 10:00, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Goal(s) - What do you hope to achieve through this project?

What should the stated goal(s) of this project be? My hope for this project is to identify and organize the data that is created by governments. To make that information easily accessible. Ultimately to learn from the past and create more accountable government. EthanRobertLee (talk) 21:17, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Politicians voting

I think recording the voting records of politicians would be a fine addition to the political data on wikidata. I know in the US there are plenty of services that show this voting record, however in many parliamentary systems, such a service just doesn't exist.

In Parliamentary systems such as NZ's, a bill is entered into parliament where it goes through three readings. First reading is the introduction of the bill with some debate, and then they vote on whether to shift it to the committee stage, where the bill is reviewed, adjusted based on that review (and public feedback), and then it comes back to Parliament for its second reading. Same thing again, new debate, then another vote. If it passes that, then it goes to a "Committee of the whole house" where Parliament debates the finer detail of the law and make recommendations for amendments to the bill, they vote on each small amendment to the bill, so there's a lot of votes in here. After this, it goes to its third and final reading, where it gets a final debate, and then goes to its third vote where if it passes that, it becomes law.

Now, some bills are voted on as party votes, where the entire party votes the same way. Others, are conscience votes, such as marriage equality laws, where each Member of Parliament gets their own vote.

So to record this on wikidata, a bill would have to record the results of the votes per reading, and whether it's a party vote, or a conscience vote.

How could we represent this on wikidata? For starters I think it would require properties around voting. Such as "Votes" or "Voted" with a list of politicians, and the qualifier of "type of vote" "Party" or "Individual/Conscience".

But then I can't think of a good way on how to represent the vote at each reading.

• Do you create a property of "First/Second/Third Reading Votes" and list the politicians as values with the actual vote as qualifiers?

• Do you create separate items "First Reading of the [Bill Name Here]" and put the votes on different items?

• Or do you have "Vote" as a property, with "First/Second/Third Reading" as values, with multiple "Voted For" qualifiers and multiple "voted against" qualifiers?

I don't know how Congressional votes work, but as much as possible you'd want to reuse the same properties across the different systems.

Would love to hear people's thoughts, and if there are other examples of individual votes being recorded on wikidata. El Dubs (talk) 20:17, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

acts and codifications

Should these have separate items? My specific example is New Mexico Legislature House Bill 651 (Q123049103), which may or may not fit 'under' New Mexico Statutes 1978 - chapter 72, water law (Q123138176). Arlo Barnes (talk) 16:39, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Structure for convictions

Mostly, the property convicted of (P1399) is used to describe what a person or legal entity is convicted of. Qualifiers like point in time (P585), court (P4884) and penalty (P1596) are used to add more information. However, we have some challenges with this practice:

• Adding a qualifier to a qualifier is not possible, so even if it's possible to add custodial sentence (Q11698769) by using the qualifier penalty (P1596), it's not possible to add information about the length of the imprisonment as a qualifier to the qualifier. In some cases this has been solved by adding a parallel qualifier with the number of years and months, but this is not a perfect solution, as some people will be convicted to both custodial sentence (Q11698769) and probation (Q13961) in the same conviction (Q2916183).
• Very often a person is convicted of several charges in the same conviction, like Keith Raniere (Q6384925). In these cases it's not possible to split up the imprisonment length between the different charges. Adding the sentencing as a separate entry will make confusion for people convicted several times.
• It's difficult to add information about convictions which were appealed.
• In some countries the sentence (Q1763090) is separated from the conviction (Q2916183), i.e. Sam Bankman-Fried (Q106543540) is found guilty, but not yet sentenced. Using the property convicted of (P1399) the way we do it today makes it difficult to differentiate here.
• The conviction is only one of many events, other relevant events could be arrest (Q1403016), remand (Q4354932), asset freezing (Q17100524), extradition (Q210603), appeal (Q329777), pardon (Q537151) and parole (Q5357120).

Possible solution:

• Use significant event (P793) as the default property and convicted of (P1399) as a qualifier for conviction (Q2916183) (and sentence (Q1763090)).
• Use duration (P2047) or add a new property for defining the duration of the imprisonment.
• Use deprecated rank (Q73737357) to identify convictions granted appeal to a superior court.
• Add a new item for reopening of a criminal case

--Cavernia (talk) 11:56, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

See Bernard Madoff (Q14043) for an example of how this can be done. --Cavernia (talk) 12:25, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Property for judicial clerkships

Hi all. I've posted a question over at Wikidata:Project chat#Property for judicial clerkships that is relevant to this project. I'm looking for potential problems with setting up a clerked for property to express judicial clerkships. Please chime in there if you have any thoughts. Thanks, gobonobo ^{+ c} 21:20, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Which date property should I use for EU law no longer in force?

Eu calls this "date of end of validity" See example https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A31979L0173&qid=1704221336790 In telegram @ainali mentioned effective date (P7588) and a new property to match that would perhaps be a good idea? So9q (talk) 18:57, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Great question. end time (P582) or dissolved, abolished or demolished date (P576) seems like possible candidates. But since they both have their own "starting" properties, it's not great. At the same time, we have effective date (P7588) which is missing the "end" part. Perhaps we need a new property, as a subproperty of (P1647) to end time (P582), to make that pair complete and clear to query for? Ainali (talk) 19:02, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Need of new property for events that violate a specific law?

I am missing a property that can state that an event allegedly violates/is a breach of a specific law or article. Note that many events that do not reach a court of even formal legal process can (according to someone) constitute breaches of a law. For instance, if I want to express which particular laws or articles of law that Joe Biden classified documents incident (Q116187976) allegedly violates (even if the official investigation concluded otherwise). Or can that be done some other way already? JoranL (talk) 20:56, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

Possible new properties required to accurately describe cases?

I'm interested in adding some Australian law cases to Wikidata, but I'm having trouble finding the right properties to use.

Looking at these two cases (1 and 2,) and this page from LawCite, I've made the below list of terms found and possible properties on Wikidata. I'd be interested to hear what people think, and whether new properties need to be added or if there's existing ones I should use.

Law term	Relevant WIkidata Property	Possible property?
Applicant	plaintiff (P1620)
Appellant	defendant (P1591)
Respondent	defendant (P1591)
Judges	judge (P1594)
Where held	court (P4884)
DATE OF HEARING:	point in time (P585)
DATE OF JUDGMENT:	publication date (P577)
Counsel		defender (P1593)
Solicitors		defender (P1593)
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION:	legal citation of this text (P1031)
JUDGMENT APPEALED FROM:		follows (P155) or overrules (P4006)
LawCite Record	AustLII ID (P5799)
Cases Referring to this Case		laws applied (P3014) or stated in (P248)
Legislation Cited	cites work (P2860)
Cases and Articles Cited	cites work (P2860)
Citation	legal citation of this text (P1031)

As an example I added this case to Wikidata to try to get an idea of how these would work. You can see it here: Q124779727. Jimmyjrg (talk) 02:11, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I've updated the table slightly. What do people think listing Counsel and Solicitor under defender (P1593)? Should Lawyer have its own property? Jimmyjrg (talk) 19:58, 12 March 2024 (UTC)