References to legislation and cases

Most judgments include references to other judgments and legislation. Tausi helps Kenya Law to mark up and extract these references. This helps the reader to follow links between decisions when viewed on the web. It also allows Kenya Law to build indexes of decisions that reference a particular piece of legislation.

Tausi automatically extracts references to both other decisions and legislation. These are stored directly in the Akoma Ntoso XML markup at the point of reference in the body of the decision.

This is the only place these references are stored. When Tausi needs to do analysis on references, they are extracted from the Akoma Ntoso XML.

Legislation

For example:

The Applicant has submitted in that context that the provisions of the Engineers Registration Act (now repealed) should have been read alongside the provisions of the Engineering Technology Act, No.23 of 2016 and the Engineers Act to reach a conclusion that Technologists and Technicians cannot and should not be registered under the latter Act as to do so would be an illegality. … We have perused both the Engineers Registration Act Cap.530 which was the law applicable at the material time.

Tausi should extract references to three pieces of legislation from this snippet of text:

  • Engineers Registration Act

  • Engineering Technology Act, No. 23 of 2016

  • Engineers Act

Decision text can reference legislation in a number of ways. Some of these are easier to link to the referenced legislation than others. Tausi recognises legislation by looking for patterns in the text, such as:

  • “Act No. 23 of 2016”

  • “Cap 530”

  • “… Act”

It then determines, if possible, the FRBR URI for the legislation and marks up the reference as a link to the FRBR URI (see below for information on how links are handled). For example:

<ref href="/akn/ke/act/2016/23">Engineers Act, No. 23 of 2016</ref>

In the case where there is an act number and year, the FRBR URI can be generated automatically.

In the case of a Cap number or a bare act title, Tausi talks to Kenya Law’s Indigo platform to determine the appropriate FRBR URI (if possible). Tausi provides Indigo with the delivery date of the case being processed to help Indigo scope the legislation that is being referenced.

Some key pieces of legislation which don’t follow the above patterns are hard-coded into Tausi, such as the Penal Code (Cap 63).

Decisions

TODO

Automation and manual intervention

References are searched for automatically when the decision is first imported.

A user can also tell Tausi to re-analyse the document for new references when editing the content of a decision.

An editor can manually correct or remove an automatically detected link, or manually mark up an undetected reference.

Linking to references

Tausi includes references to the FRBR URI for recognised legislation and cases.

These FRBR URIs uniquely and reliably identify the document being referenced. When the document is rendered (eg. as a PDF or HTML), Tausi can transform the FRBR URI into a link, either to a website or to an intermediate resolver which would then forward the user to an appropriate website.

The problem with linking directly to a website is the website needs to be known at the time of rendering. Sometimes this is not the case, such as when the case being referenced is not yet publicly available. Links may also go stale over time, such as when a target website is updated after, say, a PDF file with links is downloaded.

By deferring links to an intermediate resolver, we have the ability to adjust to new link patterns over time.

Tausi provides a basic resolver that redirects requests for Kenyan legislation and judgments to the kenyalaw.org website.