Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Law/Archive 26

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Archive 26

Article name query for controversial legal document

At Operation Gideon (2020) (which will be the subject of a separate Move request to resolve its name), see this discussion in archive about how to name a sub-article on the agreement signed between representatives of the then-government of Juan Guaidó and an outside contractor. The article is now approaching 10,000 words of readable prose, and this section of content is important to the history, but sources say the independent contractor moved on with his own plans months after the Guaidó administration backed away, so this content is getting a lot of weight in the article and is a candidate to split because of its size.

Would the sub-article

a) meet notability,

b) be subject to AFD, as a

c) POV fork or otherwise, and

d) how should it be named ?

Thanks in advance for any advice, which might be offered at this section of the article talk page. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:35, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Resolved

voorts (talk/contributions) 21:29, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

Public domain in 1948

I have just refreshed an old unanswered query at Talk:Shostakovich v. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. - it seems that no editors watching that page are able to help, and the article is unreferenced. In short, it is apparently based on the some of the composer's music already being Public Domain in the US in 1948, when he was alive enough to bring the case. As it seems so counter-intuitive, the article needs some explanation on how that was true at that time. Davidships (talk) 21:29, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

I'll take a look. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:45, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Interesting case. Working on a rewrite of the article. I would encourage anyone with more knowledge than I on copyright and moral rights to contribute. This seems like an important case from my brief review of the literature. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:20, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Replied on the talk page. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 03:05, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

@Davidships & @Extraordinary Writ: I've completely rewritten the article and nominated it for GAN. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:29, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

That's great. I've been sitting back watching you legal eagles at work (without an hourly rate) and falling into the trap of following links, so read big chunks of this yesterday with inquisitive interest. Thank you. Davidships (talk) 18:34, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Resolved

voorts (talk/contributions) 21:30, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

Article Constructive has been redirect-ified

I noticed today that Constructive has been turned into a redirect by an editor going around and scuttling articles they think are just dictionary definitions. I had to handle one in the equine topic area. This one is out of my league, but looks like legal folk ought to be able to tell if that redirect is appropriate or not. Just notifying the wikiproject since the article was neither PRODed nor AfDed (which would show up on your alerts). Grorp (talk) 05:20, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

I think the redirect is fine. "Constructive" on its own isn't really a legal term that needs its own page (although if anyone disagrees, they can of course BRD). Pinging @JamesLucas (the editor who made the redirect): Best practice is to make a note on the target page per WP:BLAR. I notice that you also didn't add a redirect category to the article. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:37, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the mention of BLAR. Didn't know about that one and I do come across articles that have been redirect-ified, and have done it myself, so that will be useful to me.

I don't know what you mean about a "redirect category", nor which article you meant by "the article". Is that something I need to know about? If so, please point me to some guideline or help article. Thanks.

I dealt with the equine article by restoring it and then expanding the article. But I had to pick through the editor's contributions to find what other articles and bits he affected in that topic area, and that's when I noticed he was doing it to other articles, too. I was just notifying this wikiproject about the Constructive article, especially since the editor's edit summary [1] expressed uncertainly about which target to point it to. Grorp (talk) 03:14, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

On redirect categories, see WP:RCAT, especially WP:REDCAT, which describes redirect templates. I meant that the now redirect page should be categorized, not "the article".

As I noted, I think this redirect is fine. "Constructive" is a broad term that has implications outside of the law and isn't really a legal term of art. voorts (talk/contributions) 03:43, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for directing me there. I have already been using rcats myself, but had never before put a category on a redirect page. Nor did I realize the rcat template would add categories. That explains the name rcat; LOL. Now I know for future use. Thanks. Grorp (talk) 04:52, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Wendell Holland nominated for deletion

I have nominated the article about Wendell Holland for deletion. You may input your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wendell Holland. Thanks! George Ho (talk) 18:49, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Bibb County School District vs. Wickman

Hi all, I am trying to find sources for Bibb County School District vs. Wickman, a 2005 case tried by the Supreme Court of Alabama and have come up with nothing across the board. No news articles, no books, nothing in the Caselaw Access Project, and nothing for the other Alabama case (Thomas vs. Dothan School District) mentioned in the body of the article. Could anyone point me to additional resources where I could look up this case? If I can't find anything I will probably nominate it for deletion. Thanks! Kazamzam (talk) 18:08, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Yep, that's definitely a hoax. Note how it's word-for-word identical in places with how the Santa Fe article looked at the time—with the exception that the court supposedly reached the exact opposite conclusion. Send it to AfD, and make sure it gets listed on the WP:HOAXLIST: thirteen-and-a-half years is pretty remarkable. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 18:25, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Argumentation theory#Requested move 23 August 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Argumentation theory#Requested move 23 August 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. —usernamekiran (talk) 15:22, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Move request at Trust law

Proposed to move to "Trust (law)": Talk:Trust_law#Requested_move_13_August_2023. 98.248.84.55 (talk) 17:58, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Tax protester constitutional arguments

Tax protester constitutional arguments has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:50, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Andrew Malkinson

Thought I should notify this WikiProject of the above article, which has been recently created. --GnocchiFan (talk) 16:45, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Input requested at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Reasonableness

Your input at this deletion request, which I believe falls under the scope of this WikiProject, would be very much appreciated. Thank you! GnocchiFan (talk) 13:18, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Example of an ideal "Law in Country" article

Is there any example or template page of an ideal (complete and aspiring to be FA) article Law in Country? --Onwa (talk) 16:30, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Credibility bot

As this is a highly active WikiProject, I would like to introduce you to Credibility bot. This is a bot that makes it easier to track source usage across articles through automated reports and alerts. We piloted this approach at Wikipedia:Vaccine safety and we want to offer it to any subject area or domain. We need your support to demonstrate demand for this toolkit. If you have a desire for this functionality, or would like to leave other feedback, please endorse the tool or comment at WP:CREDBOT. Thanks! Harej (talk) 18:06, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

US patent law: reasonable royalty as a compensation for infringement:

I started a draft article about a high-profile US case law related to reasonable royalty as a compensation for patent infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Georgia-Pacific_Corp._v._United_States_Plywood_Corp., which is still a good law, i.e. the controlling precedent. However, this article was not approved for posting. I am not sure, what can be done to improve it, and I would like to invite other editors, with expertise in the US Patent Law and in wiki rules to work on improving this draft. Walter Tau (talk) 10:42, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

@Walter Tau: The article (currently at Draft:Georgia-Pacific Corp. v. United States Plywood Corp.) reads as an overview of the rule, not of the case itself. It might be reasonable to rename the article title reflect this (ie, move to Georgia-Pacific factors. I haven't read through any of the sources, but the reviewer seems to think that the case does not meet significant coverage. I would guess that maybe the sources only mention the case to support the rule, not to discuss the case itself.

One strategy might be to incorporate this rule into a bigger subject, possibly at Royalty payment or Patent infringement, or, more likely, at Patent infringement under United States law. I’m a big believer in the expand-then-split method myself: expand the high-level article until the subtopic is clearly too big to be contained within that page, at which point you split it off. So by this logic you would create a section, Patent infringement under United States law § Georgia-Pacific factors, until needing to split it off to Georgia-Pacific factors. — HTGS (talk) 00:42, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your explanation and suggestion. In the past I actually expanded many articles myself, and then other editors split them. I am going to try this trick again here !!! Walter Tau (talk) 15:07, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Assistance?

Hello. There is a discussion at the bottom of the talk page here (Talk:Stanley Woodward (attorney)) about what is appropriate to include in an article about a lawyer. Perhaps someone at this page can weigh in? That talk page does not get many eyes. Thanks. 2603:7000:2101:AA00:948B:39F8:685B:16A6 (talk) 18:59, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Heck v. Humphrey

I was surprised to see we had no article on Heck v. Humphrey (512 U.S. 477), so I created a stub. It needs a lot of improvement. I hope editors with a better understanding of these matters will improve it.

Thanks. —Mark Dominus (talk) 06:16, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Inconsistency in Younger v. Harris

I noted at Talk:Younger v. Harris#Two different lists of three exceptions that the article seems to be inconsistent and provides two different lists of exceptions; it would be great if an expert could take a look. Joriki (talk) 19:48, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Original research problem (Indeterminacy debate in legal theory)

Hi, was hoping to get some input from contributors with law-related experience/expertise. An issue cropped up last week about an editor adding large amounts of uncited material to the page Indeterminacy debate in legal theory; when asked about citations and whether the material constituted original research, they responded with a fair amount of hostility (engaging, ironically, in a kind of weird rules-lawyering) but also seemed to confirm there was indeed OR going on. I've summarised the issue on the NOR noticeboard already, but someone there suggested I ask ye all for your take, particularly regarding whether it's worth trying to save some/all of the added text in the article by editing & adding citations and how that might be done, or whether it should just be reverted. Thanks in advance for any thoughts! AntiDionysius (talk) 13:01, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Unfortunately I'm not read up in this aspect of legal philosophy, but per my comment on the NOR noticeboard post, this is pure trolling: not following Wikipedia's P&Gs for citing sources or OR and then arguing that those rules are themselves indeterminate. voorts (talk/contributions) 15:30, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, that makes sense. I did not take the nonsense about the applicability of P&Gs especially seriously but given the editor's apparent determination to defend their work I felt like it would be good to seek some consensus before reverting all their edits; I am inclined now to do that. Thank you! AntiDionysius (talk) 15:50, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

I was just looking into where to revert this morning, this version from before the large amount of recent edits looks right. I was just holding off in case anyone else had any comments. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 15:59, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Yep, that's the one I'd been looking at too. Feel free to do so, or I'll get to it shortly. AntiDionysius (talk) 16:08, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

FTC v. Amazon

We now have an article on FTC v. Amazon. This potentially has the makings of being a landmark antitrust case; we should probably have a better article to match. — The Anome (talk) 22:42, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

Proposed solutions to issues with Backlog of unexamined patent applications

Hello,

I'm asking this here because this is the only WikiProject listed as being in the scope of that article & that article is too neglected to have an active talk page.

I noticed that this article's content deals almost exclusively with the United States, specifically the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Only a few sparse sentences throughout the article make it not a US-centric article by mentioning the European Patent Office and Japanese Patent Office, mostly in passing.

This makes the article read as unfocused and unfinished. So I suggest one of the following solutions:

A) Rename to something like "Backlog of unexamined patent applications in the United States" / "Backlog of unexamined United States patent applications" / "Backlog of USPTO applications" etc, then trim out the few sentences that aren't about the USPTO

or

B) Restructure the article to have dedicated sections about backlogs in the US, EU, Japan, and other patent offices with a high volume of applications, then rework and expand/trim as needed to give each section equal weight

or

C) Do both, making one article be about the subject globally & a separate article to contain extra US-centric info

With how few eyes are on that article, I probably could just do one of these myself and no one would care, but I thought it'd be better to at least get a second opinion before trying to make any major changes. Any thoughts or comments are appreciated.

Thank you,

 Vanilla  Wizard 💙 16:09, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

I think renaming is just enough, because it is almost about the backlog of pending patents in the US. The mentions about the backlogs in other countries could be kept as comparative cases, or any other use case useful to explain the article's subject. The proposed name should be one best depicting article's contents. The first and second proposals are easy to understand, and each one of them foresee the possibility of similar articles for other countries. The third proposal is not that clear. I don't know if there is any other proposal for renaming that could be OK. Onwa (talk) 17:37, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Option A1 is the clearest imo. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:32, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, Vanilla Wizard, for taking this on! Option C seems the best option to me. The backlog at the EPO, and in Europe in general, is also discussed in many sources (for example, from a quick search: [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]) and should not be neglected IMHO. The material is out there :-). Edcolins (talk) 14:00, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Thank you so very much for providing me with a lengthy list of sources to work with! This will be very helpful! I'll probably start with expanding the article to include more non-American info and then balance it out by forking America-centric info to an article draft focused specifically on the USPTO backlog and try to bring that article up to shape.  Vanilla  Wizard 💙 17:34, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

One way to structure it would be an article on Europe, an article on the US, etc., and then a general article (or list with context) on global patent backlogs. voorts (talk/contributions) 17:37, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Additional opinions on updates to Qualified immunity

There's a discussion in Talk:Qualified immunity#Update_to_cover_Reinert_article? about whether and how to include content pertaining to an analysis of the foundations of qualified immunity, along with a recently filed, pertinent SCOTUS petition in the case of Hulbert v. Pope.

The discussion has also ranged into other content within the article that could potentially be revised in accordance with WP:OR, specifically WP:PRIMARY. The current editors are deadlocked, and it would be helpful to have others weigh in on how best to go about updating the article, since Qualified immunity is within the scope of WP:LAW. Thanks! Wigginx (talk) 05:09, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

Replied there. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:26, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:CanLawCase

Template:CanLawCase has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. -- 65.92.244.127 (talk) 21:39, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Rename "Court Case Task Force"

An editor has requested that Wikipedia:WikiProject Current events/Court Case Task Force be moved to another page, which may be of interest to this WikiProject. You are invited to participate in the move discussion. -- 65.92.244.127 (talk) 22:31, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Style question

Is there a consensus over whether the "v" in court cases shoukd have a full stop ("v.") or not? There are many examples of both in article titles. Colonies Chris (talk) 19:06, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

In England it's usually displayed as just 'v', in USA it's 'v.' GiantSnowman 19:46, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

I would take a look at the Bluebook international tables, which describes the local style for particular jurisdictions. As Snowman noted, the U.S. always uses a full stop and England does not. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Law related TV and film

Hello, just wondering if law related shows/film are within the scope of this project? Pages such as:

• Legal drama
• Law & Order
• Anatomy of a Murder

etc...

Thanks in advance :) Idiosincrático (talk) 05:14, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't think they are within the scope, but the wikiproject page says "Some Wikipedians have formed a project to better organize information in articles related to Law.", so for some they could be included and for others they are not. --Onwa (talk) 21:50, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Featured article nomination of Shostakovich v. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.

I have nominated the above named article for FA (nomination page). If somebody with expertise in IP, particularly moral rights and copyright, has time to review the article and leave comments on the nomination page, I would appreciate it. Best, voorts (talk/contributions) 20:49, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Excellent, well done for nominating it! I saw the article on the main page and was immediately drawn in. §§ LegFun §§ talk §§ 19:49, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Deportation of undocumented Afghans from Pakistan#Requested move 5 November 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Deportation of undocumented Afghans from Pakistan#Requested move 5 November 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. —Alalch E. 23:59, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Student editing non-notable attorney bios

See Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/North Carolina Central University/Artificial Intelligence and Law (Fall 2023).

This class came to my attention via a backlink to a non-reliable source, attorneyatlawmagazine.com (see the discussion at this RSN thread and I suspect that this site, which is also used by the students, is more of the same).

The work they have done so far is problematic (see Melanie Harrison Okoro), and there's more in the pipeline that look like run-of-the-mill, non-notable attorneys, being puffed up by non-reliable or sources which they paid for coverage (see sample at User:Oabrown23/April Dawson). I understand non-notable attorney articles squeak through on scant scrutiny quite often, as they get passing mention (not significant coverage) in press for cases, but this is an entire class creating problematic bios, which might warrant special attention from this project, as it looks like several are headed for deletion.

The instructor, user:9Starbucks, has never edited mainspace, and there is also Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/North Carolina Central University/Artificial Intelligence and Law (Fall 2023). Ping User:Brianda (Wiki Ed) and User:Ian (Wiki Ed) and User:Helaine (Wiki Ed). This class does not seem to have a grasp on reliable sources or notability. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:05, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Note that in the case of April Dawson, there's also a COI (NCCU); I haven't checked others. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:18, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up. I hope that the Wiki Ed folks can address this. voorts (talk/contributions) 03:00, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

In the medical realm, I've had good luck with Ian having a word with the professor, but I don't know about this editing area. Hopefully, they will suggest the students in this class not move their work out of sandbox, but the articles already established need cleanup, and maybe AFD (haven't checked closely). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:02, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Hi @SandyGeorgia, Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I've asked the instructor to keep student work in the sandbox, until we have a chance to review and provide feedback to the students. Will keep you updated. If anything else comes up, please ping me. Just fyi, I'm at WikiCon North America, and will be a bit slow to respond. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:56, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Brianda (Wiki Ed) thanks so much for that. Now perhaps the good members of WP:LAW can focus only on cleaning up the already problematic at :

• Melanie Harrison Okoro
• Valencia Koomson
• Rediet Abebe
• Ralph Gilles
• Khalia Braswell

Some of the sourcing is atrocious, WP:SIGCOV may not be met in all cases, not sure if any AFDs are in order, cleanup needs, etc. Thanks again, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:21, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

I went through those, and unlike User:Oabrown23/April Dawson, they aren't lawyers, so nothing else for this project to address, if the rest won't be moved to mainspace. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:35, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

SandyGeorgia, thank you for making me aware of the discussion here, and thanks for catching the copyvio situation at Valencia Koomson. Likely I should've noticed the latter myself. I take the student editor at Koomson's article as having acted in good faith, and not at fault for the copyvio situation; I do agree that it looks like they could be getting better mentoring in the course than they have been. FWIW and possibly slightly off-topic: in my opinion notability looks a bit unlikely at the articles Melanie Harrison Okoro (already at AfD) and Rediet Abebe, somewhat more plausible for Valencia Koomson and Khalia Braswell via GNG but not WP:NPROF; I didn't look as carefully at Ralph Gilles. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 02:51, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Russ Woodroofe the copyvio pre-dated the students, and in almost every student editing problem, it's not the student-- it's the lax professors, who have never edited Wikipedia, getting free writing tutors at the expense of volunteer Wikipedians (the problems in medical content are real, as opposed to just puffery). I only found this one because I regularly check backlinks to attorneyatlawmagazine, because it's so infuriating that run-of-the mill, non-notable attorneys pay a magazine to be featured, so they can then get a Wikipedia article by using the magazine to claim notability (that gig is up :) I am more than a little bit dismal at AFD, so I take care in what I submit. Which is also why one of the first things I check is copyvio from the first version; that's a quicker route than AFD, and saves you the time of checking every other source and discovering the copyvio after you've invested a lot of work into the article! I can't convince myself any of the others should go to AFD, but I'm a terrible judge (used to working at the FA level, little experience with AFD), so will leave that to others. This course will be back for a spring term, and hopefully by then, Wiki Ed staff will have gotten the message across. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:32, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Another one to be on the look out for: Lawnext.com (similar to attorneyatlawmagazine.com). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:42, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Deletion discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2023 Special Session of the Parliament of India

 You are invited to join the deletion discussion for the article 2023 Special Session of the Parliament of India at AFD. Kind regards, W. Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_c) 15:45, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

General jurisdiction

General jurisdiction was nominated for deletion, and I would appreciate some help in improving the article to avoid a repeat of this. Cheers! BD2412 T 19:36, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Jo Hee-de#Requested move 12 December 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Jo Hee-de#Requested move 12 December 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. UtherSRG (talk) 12:50, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Hamdan v. Rumsfeld

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:55, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri

United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Hog Farm _Talk 15:18, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Bump

Anyone willing to take a look at my DYK please? Template:Did you know nominations/Fair Work Ombudsman v Quest South Perth — MaxnaCarta  ( 💬 • 📝 ) 23:44, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Sexual and gender-based violence in the 7 October attack on Israel#Requested move 8 January 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Sexual and gender-based violence in the 7 October attack on Israel#Requested move 8 January 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 21:09, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Constitution of New Jersey

Constitution of New Jersey has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:18, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Position of trust

The article on position of trust could do with quite a bit of work, and seems to have been in this state for quite a while. Bringing it here for anyone who is interested in improving the article. GnocchiFan (talk) 20:33, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Progressivity in United States income tax

I started this discussion: Talk:Progressivity in United States income tax#Various polls by media organizations. George Ho (talk) 05:06, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Bharatiya Sakshya Act, 2023#Requested move 7 February 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Bharatiya Sakshya Act, 2023#Requested move 7 February 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. – robertsky (talk) 19:12, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Full Faith and Credit Clause#Requested move 21 January 2024

A suggestion to lowercase the name of this U.S. Constitution clause, now in a relisting. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:57, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

Hello, Please note that International trade law, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of the Articles for improvement. The article is scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "Articles for improvement" section for one week, beginning today. Everyone is encouraged to collaborate to improve the article. Thanks, and happy editing! Delivered by — MusikBot talk 00:05, 11 December 2023 (UTC) on behalf of the AFI team

Business method patent vs. business model

Calling for patent and copyright experts to overhaul the article in regards to the fundamental difference between a business method and a business model, as outlined in my relevant post on the talkpage. --2003:DA:CF0A:F294:686B:7CDE:7FD1:8E41 (talk) 09:05, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Discussion regarding LAWRS proposal at VPP

There's a proposal for a LAWRS at VPP that others might be interested in: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § Wanted: a WP:LAWRS. Best, voorts (talk/contributions) 00:54, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

What would help a lot with such discussion (if it ever can be helped) is to contribute examples of bad use of law-related sourcing one has seen on WP, or arguments one has had over bad sourcing. SamuelRiv (talk) 14:25, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia language versions are not suitable categories for law

For many subjects related to law, the main Wikipedia categorising in language versions doesn't work. Main reason is because law is being categorised by jurisdiction, not language. For example the Dutch language Wikipedia knows at least two jurisdictions: Belgium and The Netherlands, the German language Wikipedia knows at least three jurisdictions: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the English language version knows many more, to start with the biggest: United Kingdom and the United States. So a law concept valid for one jurisdiction cannot be projected into another jurisdiction by simply translating a language version of a law concept. Therefore it's difficult to properly describe law concepts and give the articles logical names. It is impossible to connect articles within one language version, describing the situation in different jurisdictions, through Wikidata. Does anyone know: has this been discussed before and if yes, what was the outcome? When not, are there existing solutions for this problem or do they have to be developed? Thanks -VanArtevelde (talk) 10:58, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't understand. When a term has multiple meanings in different contexts, the article about the term explains those meanings in as many contexts as editors are able to add. For example, the term dualism in philosophy is grotesquely overloaded, as is complexity in physics and mathematics (or field, or any variable name for that matter). So a structure of law like a decree or a corporation will have different meanings in different jurisdictions and contexts, and sure enough, the articles list many (but not all) such contexts. SamuelRiv (talk) 13:57, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Legal status of LGBT in Indonesia

Hi.. There's a discussion to clarify definition of "legal" on Talk:LGBT rights in Indonesia#Legal's meaning , More opinions are welcome. Thank you. Ckfasdf (talk) 04:30, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Responded at the appropriate venue. voorts (talk/contributions) 04:49, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Topfreedom

While undoubtedly an important topic, I feel like this article and Female toplessness in the United States ought to be properly analysed by members of this WikiProject and that of WikiProject Sex and Sexology to make sure the detail given is not unduly intricate, whether the number of images are gratuitous (yes yes, I know Wikipedia is uncensored), and whether the sources given are reliable for the claims made as there seems to be some issues on the talk page for this. Thank you in advance! GnocchiFan (talk) 21:23, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't really have the time or expertise to weigh in here, unfortunately, but is the necklace in this image a Swastika in a Star of David???? If so, that's certainly an ideology or something. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:18, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Raëlism Levivich (talk) 23:48, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Discussion you may be interested in

Talk:British_Post_Office_scandal#Structural_issues_and_general_format_unsuitability - the article on the British Post Office scandal has extensive legalese coverage that may be better split into separate articles. The input of users who are familiar with writing about civil and criminal court cases in the UK would be appreciated. Kingsif (talk) 23:43, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Legal norm

I was looking at the original 14.5kb revision of Legal norm (rev. 897919123), and I'm not sure if I believe that that could be original writing done all in one go, without copying it from somewhere wholesale. Earwig came up with 97% likelihood of copying, but that appears to be a backwards copy (or at least, archive.org has never crawled it). By rev. 900737115 a couple of weeks later, the OP had added eleven references, but the citations generally lack page numbers and feel like an afterthought to me, as if someone knew enough about policy to feel obligated to add some, and just sprinkled around some good, general references here and there without being too specific to make it hard to verify. But the polished language was there since the beginning. Just wondering what folks here think about this? Am I being paranoid, and this is just an editor who's lazy with citations and the article is probably fine? Or is this wholesale copying, and I should slap a {{copyvio}} on it on the way to blanking the article and getting the history WP:REVDELed? Mathglot (talk) 08:11, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

It looks like the writer was a university student learning to write for Wikipedia, and the article was written in advance. In the absence of evidence, I see no reason to think it was a copyright violation. John M Baker (talk) 12:41, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Why are crime and law enforcement this project's ambit?

I don't find that most articles about specific instances of crimes require attention from law experts. Not unless the legal appraisal is complex or in dispute, or a novel legal issue is raised. Nor do I think that law enforcement is really our domain, except for criminal procedure law and such. Of course, prosecutors are trained in law, but I don't think that means we should automatically put articles about their actions in the scope of WP:LAW. I find it makes it harder to find articles that are actually mainly about law, and not just tangentially connected. Surely Wikipedia Project: Criminal Justice is more specialized?

To this end, I've posted at the Village Pump idea lab, under the section Excise the "crime" topic from the "law" topic; make "law, government and administration" an established grouping of topics". I'd appreciate everyone's input.

Incidentally, I also have some quibbles about poor delineations of scope for many law articles; often, they don't specify that they're specific to jurisdictions in the common law tradition, and don't say what the civil law equivalent would be. But I'll make that the subject of a separate section sometime later.

Thank you for your attention. §§ LegFun §§ talk §§ 20:33, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Could you post a link to your idea lab post? Generally, WikiProjects decide their own scope, not the Village Pump. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:35, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

WikiProjects deciding their own scope does make sense. I went to the Village Pump because my initial concern was for the categories that general pages like the FAC review processes use to group together candidates. They put crime in with law, which I find a bit deceptive. A big reform like that on a page like FAC that involves more people than just WP:LAW users made me think getting a broader consensus was the way to go.

But now that I think about it, this evening's comment and my earlier comment on the Village Pump idea lab page aren't identical. So I'll leave my Village Pump comment just for reference, and declare my comment on this page its own thing. I'd love to link my other comment, but I've encountered some difficulty because the title I chose for it contains quotation marks, so I'm afraid I don't know how to write out the bit after the # to make a working link . . . §§ LegFun §§ talk §§ 20:55, 17 January 2024 (UTC) — edited 20:58 UTC

Also, generally speaking, this WikiProject doesn't have any active projects going on right now. Some people watch this talk page and there are occasional posts/questions, but other than that, there's no coordination. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:02, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Ah, I see. I also get the feeling that law isn't the most active topic in general? Maybe with the exception of biographies and U.S. Supreme Court cases?

I suppose it's especially difficult to put into an encyclopedic format; doubly so because a worldwide perspective involves comparative law, which few people are trained in (yours truly isn't either . . . yet.) §§ LegFun §§ talk §§ 21:04, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

I'd say on the contrary that matters of law are frequently discussed at current events articles, and all too often people would rather interpret primary sources as written, or cite non-qualified secondary sources, than go by what is really existing P&G. (The discussion at the LAWRS VPP proposal linked above rather bothered me at the number of people saying no problem existed, or expert secondary sources weren't necessary.) Just from my watchlist this week: Talk:Alan_Dershowitz#Source_falsification (Epstein whodunnits), Talk:LGBT_rights_in_Indonesia#Legal_status, Talk:White_phosphorus_munitions/Archives/2020/January (I had to remove all this garbage that was re-added), Talk:War_crimes_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine (we gave up), Talk:Assassination_of_Qasem_Soleimani#Change_article_name_to_"Killing_of_Qasem_Soleimani" (et al over 6 archives, similar to every other assassination/killing/MDK page name). From pages I frequent, international law is the topic people seem to misunderstand most, yet think they can cite non-experts in most (which is convenient because international criminal law is almost never prosecuted -- by design afaiu). Anything that can be done to raise attention to the need for keeping to actually reliable RS is worthwhile in itself. SamuelRiv (talk) 00:01, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Mexico vs gun manufacturers

I am looking for the case mentioned in [10]. But I was only able to find Estados Unidos Mexicanos v. DeCoster. How do I find the mentioned case? --Ysangkok (talk) 03:07, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

http://media.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/22-1823P-01A.pdf (I searched the First Circuit website for opinions released on 1/22/2024). voorts (talk/contributions) 03:43, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Invention Secrecy Act

Hi, I found this project/group from the talk page here after I started expanding the article linked. Are there any examples of laws that had limited duration impacts on individuals like this one did with its Secrecy Orders that I should look at when considering formatting? I'm thinking that a listing of notable individual situations that were later declassified would be very useful as examples. I wanted to find other articles that may have similar things so that I could see how they are arranged. Thanks. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 00:20, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

The Patriot Act has obvious similarities, but I am not sure to what extent anything in that article might be useful to you. John M Baker (talk) 00:37, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't see why that should be written as a list, rather than written in prose in a section on the history of the Act. voorts (talk/contributions) 00:50, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I assumed as prose, yeah. I just wanted to find something kind of along those lines to see how other articles did it. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 01:27, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I can't think of any off the top of my head, but you might want to look at Featured Articles under this WikiProject. I am going to leave some comments on the article talk page. voorts (talk/contributions) 02:03, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks again, your help was great, as well as looking at those. It let me add more of a broader array of sources that I can go back to now, and new directions to dig. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 15:36, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Furrer v Snelling

Can we comment on this article? Bearian (talk) 20:46, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

RfC related to law.

FYI. RfC related to legal cases:

• Talk:J._Sai_Deepak#RfC_on_lawsuits_inclusion

--David Tornheim (talk) 08:26, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Henry v London Greater Transport Services

I came across this article on an English law case; it could use some attention from someone interested in English law. For one thing, the lead trails off in an incomplete sentence, and looking at the history, it looks like that's how it was created! And much of the body of the article is hard to grasp for someone not knowledgeable in English law - like, is "reasonable, certain and notorious" really a thing? What does it mean? Brianyoumans (talk) 17:56, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

I removed the half-written sentence and tagged this as unreferenced. Pinging @James500, who works on UK law topics. Best, voorts (talk/contributions) 21:55, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

"Reasonable, certain and notorious" is the test for the legal validity of a trade custom that was given in the judgment in Bond v CAV Ltd [1983] IRLR 360 (a test that was said to be based on earlier decisions in Devonald v Rosser and R v Stoke upon Trent). This test is described in paragraph 28 of the judgment in Henry v London General Transport Services, and in paragraphs 28 and 29 it is said that the Employment Tribunal, and the parties to the case, all agreed with this test. "Reasonable, certain and notorious" is certainly "really a thing", and that fact should have been obvious from even the most cursory examination of the transcript of the judgment linked to, as a reference, from the article. There is, frankly, nothing surprising about that test. Local customs, for example, have been required to be reasonable and certain by cases and other authority from at least as early as the 14th to 17th centuries, and this is so fundamental and well known that it is covered in some detail in the most introductory (university undergraduate) books on English law: [11] (citing cases at least as far back as 13 Edw 3, which is approximately 1339). And, in all fairness, "reasonable, certain and notorious" is not difficult to understand, nothwithstanding that there is a certain amount of nuance in the precise meaning of those expressions. "Reasonable, certain and notorious" are ordinary English words. Any reader who cannot understand at least the gist of those words is a reader who cannot speak English. For example, in this context, "notorious" just means something to the effect that the custom is so well known that the relevant person could not have failed to assume that it was impliedly included in his contract. This is so obvious that, even if you did not know what was said in Bond v CAV Ltd (and you do know what was said in that case, because there is an external link to a source that quotes it), it should not be difficult to understand. "Something that everyone knows" is the ordinary meaning of the word "notorious" in any context, and readers should know what that word means. James500 (talk) 00:34, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

The article definitely looks improved. On the western side of The Pond where I reside "notorious" almost universally means "to be known for one's evil deeds", but you are correct that I should have thought of its original meaning of simply "well known". Thanks for the explanation! Brianyoumans (talk) 02:06, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Offence against the person#Requested move 24 February 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Offence against the person#Requested move 24 February 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. ASUKITE 03:00, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Women's month categorizations

Hello. In honor of the women's month, I invite members of this wikiproject and editors in general to help populate Category:Women's firsts, specially pages related to law, like Category:First women judges and Category:First women chief justices. Sincerely, --Thinker78 (talk) 00:37, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Please weigh in on Gibson Dunn.

I’m hoping to find editors with an interest in law to take a look at some suggested changes. The current page contains numerous policy violations leading to the mischaracterization of several prominent cases. I have a conflict, so I’ll leave it to neutral editors to decide:Talk:Gibson_Dunn#February_2024_Requested_Edits CaseyatLeicesterStreet (talk) 14:33, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I'll take a look. Sorry the edit request has taken so long. I assume that's because it includes several changes. SilverLocust 💬 16:26, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Ronald M. George

Ronald M. George has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Spinixster (chat!) 11:15, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Seton Hall reports#Requested move 28 March 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Seton Hall reports#Requested move 28 March 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 13:12, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

New article: Consciousness of guilt

I have finished enough of Consciousness of guilt to go public with it. Further development will be appreciated. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 19:04, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I'd recommend looking at law reviews, law journals, and legal treatises on evidence. voorts (talk/contributions) 00:08, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Legal status of fictional pornography depicting minors#Requested move 20 March 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Legal status of fictional pornography depicting minors#Requested move 20 March 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. – robertsky (talk) 11:25, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Capital punishment#Requested move 1 April 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Capital punishment#Requested move 1 April 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. RodRabelo7 (talk) 01:58, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Capital punishment in New York (state)#Requested move 10 April 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Capital punishment in New York (state)#Requested move 10 April 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. RodRabelo7 (talk) 02:00, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:2023 Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip#Requested move 11 April 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:2023 Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip#Requested move 11 April 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. RodRabelo7 (talk) 00:21, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Updating Template:Cite court

Hello, I've done some work on {{Cite court}}. I've made live two updates that I believe are uncontroversial. The template now supports |archive-url= and |url-status=, and an obscure formatting bug is resolved. I have questions about a few changes. I'm testing these in the sandbox but have no plans to implement them unless there is a demand.

[A] Access-date

Should the template display the access date as the CS1/CS2 templates do? The |access-date= parameter does nothing and has never done anything, but 4,600 out of 10,600 uses of the template contain an access-date.[12] After recently discussing this on Template talk:Cite court with a very knowledgeable editor, it seems like legal citations generally do not place an emphasis on the URL.

[B] Should the template make a link

Currently the template provides a link if an editor places one in the |url= parameter. If no url is provided, there's no link. If the template can auto-generate a URL to the case on CourtListener from its other parameters, should it?

[C] Aliases

Currently the template only uses one alias (alternative parameter name). Over the years editors have asked for several parameters to have an alias more in line with other templates. Which of the following aliases (if any) would be useful:

• |title= for |litigants=
• |volume= for |vol=
• |work= for |reporter=
• |at= for |pinpoint=
• |year= for |date=

Thanks, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 23:54, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

I have fairly strong opinions on [B] — Linking, as you can see from the Template talk:Cite court discussion. But one of the big issues here is that there are multiple templates with overlapping scope that behave in different ways, but those differences aren't principled or reasoned, they just seem to be personal preference, with the result that Wikipedia is annoyingly inconsistent as to legal citation. I also only care about legal citation in the American legal system, and none of these templates are defined to be specific to the US system, but in practice that's what they're generally used for.

We have:

Template:cite court (5,500 transclusions)

Template:law report (137 transclusions)

Template:caselaw source (4,000 transclusions)

I think it doesn't make a lot of sense to discuss the behavior of one of these without discussing the others, nor is it clear to me that all three of these should exist.

Template:Cite court's documentation suggests favoring Google Scholar. Template:Law report creates links to courtlistener.com. Template:caselaw source gives ten different sources they could possibly use, many of which might conceivably have the underlying opinion (but some are for other stuff, like Cornell's LII has laws: statues and regulations).

It's my considered opinion that of the available choices Google Scholar gives the best reading experience for readers, especially ones who care about legal citation and need to resolve pincites, because it gives reporter pagination in the left margin. Courtlistener gives paragraph numbers in the left column margin, which is nice in the abstract, but in practice is almost never used in the legal citation world in general (with some particular local exceptions), so is not helpful to readers. We could walk through the other 8 options (cornell, findlaw, justia, leagle, loc, openjurist, oyez, vlex), but I'm not sure that's productive right now.

It would be great if the template could make a link to Google Scholar based on the reporter/volume/page, but Google Scholar doesn't support that. Instead you have to do a search to get the case=11156910755936011541 parameter.

I do not think we should make it easy for editors avoid the work to put in a Google Scholar link by autogenerating a link to one of the other sites (including Courtlistener). That results in a less usable encyclopedia and that's not great.

As to [A] — access-date, the discussion really came up about support for archive-url, but it seems like it's hard to argue that it's wrong to have access-date there, and most Wikipedia citation-ish templates use it. But I'm not sure I can come up with an actual real live situation where it is important to have it, so it feels a little bit like clutter. But I don't oppose it.

No opinion as to [C] aliases, at least right now. jhawkinson (talk) 00:55, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for working on this. In general, I think we need an overhaul of these citation formats so that they can be used for multiple jurisdictions, not just US (BlueBook) citation style. I think that could be done using a parameter with a country code that changes the output based on the most popular citation style for a jurisdiction. One way to decide what to support would be to look at how many articles we have on cases from each country, but I would say at least US and UK citation formats should be included. UK would also probably capture other commonwealth countries. To answer your specific questions:

• A – No, do not include access dates.
• B – Maybe? I need to think on it.
• C – Caption, not title, and changing vol to volume and year to date is fine, but keep everything else as is because that's how cases are cited and it's less confusing when citing. Can't those parameters be passed in as aliases of title, volume, etc., so people can still use those if they want?

Best, voorts (talk/contributions) 14:42, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

@Voorts: To clarify regarding, "Can't those parameters be passed in as aliases of title, volume, etc., so people can still use those if they want?" Yes, that's exactly how an alias works. You can test this or inspect the source[13] to see how it works with |date= and |year=, the only alias currently supported. The template emits the same output for either parameter name. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 07:04, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

@Voorts writes, "I think we need an overhaul of these citation formats so that they can be used for multiple jurisdictions, not just US (BlueBook) citation style." Why? US citation is the vast bulk of the use of these templates, and has particular stylistic and technical aspects that are not shared by other legal systems (at least, as far as I am aware). It would seem better to have domain-specific templates rather than to try to make one template do everything. Less complexity, easier maintenance, better-looking output. (On the other hand, I'm not sure what problems there are with the current template for non-US usage right now. Has anyone reported or discussed them?). Note, to be perhaps hypertechnical, that Bluebook is not a great term to use for this, because that's a whole complicated citation system that is much more than just case names, reporters, pages, and volumes. But this style is certainly consistent with bluebook. jhawkinson (talk) 16:06, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

What I was getting at is that for an article, say, on a US case or US law, the average reader would probably recognize and expect case citations that are at least Bluebook-ish, whereas an average reader looking at an article on UK law would expect something similar to UK citation style. Currently, our template is loosely based on the Bluebook style, which I think is an issue.

I think it would be easy for this to be one template: just create a paramater that lets an editor input a two-letter country code (e.g., US, UK, etc.), and the template changes the output in the background. I don't think it would overcomplicate things for editors and probably wouldn't be too hard for a skilled template crafter to make. voorts (talk/contributions) 22:57, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Maybe? You'd have to build the template from scratch, I think. For the 3 mentioned so far, it's relatively easy (even for an unskilled template crafter) to move those closer to the US/Bluebook citation style. I really don't see how we could make them swap formats like that without essentially packing many templates into one, and making the load time multiply by the number of styles added.

For example, a |case= parameter like Jhawkinson mentioned above, could be added to create pinpoint links to Google Scholar that could override the URL parameters, but would only work for US cases. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 23:53, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

I hadn't even thought of load times etc. I'm not an expert on templates. Fair enough, these should probably be separate templates, but I don't know if anyone is really asking for them right now. voorts (talk/contributions) 00:00, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

@Voorts: One of the good reasons to not make a huge complicated template is that this template is used in a lot of places and is editprotected, because mistakes could be high stakes. But a template for some UK style would be new, and would want to be able to evolve easily and freely, and ideally would allow unrestricted editing (or maybe semiprotection if it got enough use), so that it could be quickly changed. (Now, of course, this template could call out to a different template for UK cases, but…). Anyhow, I am still missing why "I think we need an overhaul of these citation formats"? Where's the demand? Where are all the requests? Who is making this case? This template has enough problems that are real and we should be worrying about, but I would like to avoid scope creep on these questions if it is not necessary. Thanks.

And @Rjjiii: I was not suggesting the template should have a |case= parameter! My point was that the Google Scholar URL has that parameter in it, and there's no way to generate it -- you have to do a search in Google Scholar and see what it returns. I don't think it would be particularly helpful to have a parameter that generates the Google Scholar URL versus just allowing/encouraging editors to drop in the full Google Scholar URL. jhawkinson (talk) 00:07, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

I've struck my comment above, Jhawkinson. I (mis?)took your case 11156910755936011541 parameter. comment as a reference to a potential template parameter on Wikipedia. Also, to be clear, I don't think there is enough interest in these templates to build consensus for major changes right now. Rjjiii (ii) (talk) 01:13, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Asking the potentially obvious question: Is there a reason this template is not a part of the WP:CS1 family? HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 21:08, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Please add the field |archive-date= to match the |archive-url=. —DocWatson42 (talk) 05:57, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

I second this. These have been repeatedly requested by multiple users at the template talk and are very beneficial to editors as not all court PDFs that are cited on here have readably accessible backups available. The Internet bot is currently attempting to add these though can only add archive-url though that itself causes some errors with the missing parameter of "archive-date=". Trailblazer101 (talk) 19:11, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

@Rjjiii: pinging so you'll see the above request. Trailblazer101 (talk) 19:13, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

@Trailblazer101 and DocWatson42: I have added |archive-date= as an optional parameter.[14] It will only have an effect if |archive-url= is used. It can be omitted without issue. The documentation and template data still need to be updated. Could you elaborate on the "errors with the missing parameter" and does this resolve those errors? Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 06:44, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@Rjjiii: Thank you, and I'm glad you asked! I put together a little visual example of how this template currently looks compared to what is typically expected from other cite temps, just to ensure consistency throughout our templates. The examples and noted differences can be found in my sandbox here. Trailblazer101 (talk) 18:18, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

The comma separator is used by {{cite court}} and Bluebook on which it's based: Case citation#United States. Compared to {{Citation}}, which currently uses commas by default, it looks the same. There was no consensus for adding the |access-date= parameter, so I never implemented it in the live template. Thanks for the feedback, Trailblazer101, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 06:09, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

The easiest way to work with CS1 is to wrap an existing template (category link), as in legal formatting subtemplates like {{Cite Hansard}} (or my own attempt at a unified European legal citation template (discussion link)). I've worked a little on putting a basic law template into the CS1 module code the summer before last -- some of the maintainers were encouraging and some were discouraging from the beginning.

The reason for writing the template as a subset of CS1, as opposed to wrapping, is because the typical US legal citation is a bit out-of-order, when you think about what corresponds to metadata for "title", "author", "date", etc., and a wrapper can't really do too much in re-ordering. CS1 code has huge advantages that we'd want to preserve, and the disadvantage to just forking it (and not dealing with the existing maintainers) is that you are not on their update stream.

My plan was to start with a CS1 module fork (which I think is mostly finished (module link), and see my template draft page for documentation and testing) called "cite law" or something, that can then be wrapped for {{cite patent}}, {{tl:cite court}}, and the like. If the fork code works well enough, then I deal with the politics of CS1. SamuelRiv (talk) 19:30, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

If you plan on continuing to work on this project, I would suggest sub-templates, such as one that follow US-style citations (I think it should use the Indigo Book, which is a PD version of the BlueBook) and one that follows UK/commonwealth-style citations. voorts (talk/contributions) 19:36, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

For example, I think a U.S. case cite should look something like this: Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803). Archived from the original on March 22, 2024. Retrieved March 31, 2024. Another example (taken from the Indigo Book): Macy’s Inc. v. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc., No. 1728, slip op. at 1 (N.Y. App. Div. Feb. 26, 2015), http://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/3dseries/2015/2015_01728.htm. Archived from the original on March 17, 2024. Retrieved March 31, 2024.

If you wanted to go even further, a sub-template for {{sfn}} that makes short cites easier (see, e.g., Shostakovich v. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., where I had to do it manually) would be amazing. voorts (talk/contributions) 19:44, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

The basic law-style supertemplate for a CS1-style module needs to have its basic metadata-enabled fields in the order: "title [ie litigants or law], journal [ie reporter or journal], authors [ie legislature or court], date"; the wrapper problem is that no existing CS1 template style has this ordering, but almost every legal citation format can be shoehorned in this way. (Making a wrapper for CS1 doesn't allow you to change the order of the fields that are output.) Once the supertemplate is made, with the fields in that order, and a few field aliases are added, then a crapload of correctly-formatted subtemplates can just be wrapped on that. [Addendum: an ID/docket number varies greatly in placement with international citations, so probably wouldn't be universally wrapped.] SamuelRiv (talk) 19:47, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't know much about the politics of CS1, but since there's no rules for citations, other than following WP:CITEVAR, I can't see why there should be any issues with developing a set of CS1-forked law citation templates. How long do you anticipate this project taking? voorts (talk/contributions) 19:50, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

It was supposed to just take the summer, but I seem to get discouraged and chased away easily. I think it's mostly done save for tweaks and updating with the latest CS1 code. Anyone is free to modify the module in my sandbox also, or else we should just move it to a stable module project -- it's not like there's no record of the original code. (And by "dealing with the politics of CS1" I meant someone else not me probably has to do that, should integration be a future option. There was apparently a lot of drama with {{cite patent}}.)

So let's do this as the timeline: get the current module base code from CS1 and update from my sandbox (all changes I made for the "cite law" style should be self-contained functions). (I'm generally familiar with this code base so I should probably be the one to do this, but anyone can do it themselves if they want to get familiar.) The new module and template name are Module:Cite law and Template:Cite law (the latter has to split from its redirect to {{Cite act}}, which wraps CS1 {{cite book}} -- in doing so an AWB script (or manual -- only 99 articles) has to rename all the existing "cite law" template calls). Alternatively, we can used Template:Cite legal, which is unused, but less snappy imo.

Next, fix the code and test thoroughly for existing templates to replace, starting with the smallest and working up to cite court and cite patent for the US, and simultaneously the UK templates, seeing how much can be kept as wrappers of the single supertemplate. Finally, expand the implementation to replace European and other templates as is practical. SamuelRiv (talk) 20:08, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

{{cite case law}} would be the most descriptive name for a template used to cite a legal case. Can that be usurped from {{cite court}}, and then any uses of that switched out by AWB or bot? Would that be a controversial change requiring a TfD discussion? voorts (talk/contributions) 20:29, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Nevermind, looks like {{cite case law}} is used on very few pages. Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Cite case law voorts (talk/contributions) 20:31, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Because the supertemplate (or more precisely, the CS1 module "style" that can be called for a template wrapper) formatting seems applicable for typical styles of citations for not only Common Law case law, but also UK legislative acts, as well as French Civil case law and what I poorly understand of French decrees etc. So for the name of the supermodule style, and supertemplate (if needed), I'd rather have something broad ("cite legal" might be most descriptive on second thought). It's really just about getting the title to output before the author in the supermodule. (And the reason you can't just rename the fields is because they have metadata.) SamuelRiv (talk) 20:39, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm a bit confused. Is your intent for {{cite law}} to be a template to cite a statute only, or for the template to be used to cite both statutory acts and case law? voorts (talk/contributions) 20:46, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

CS1 can accommodate however many styles one wants to code up, and its modularity on that is... improving, but for each style adding it is politically like pulling teeth. So what I'm thinking, and what seemed feasible from before, is a single CS1 style that is put into a supertemplate ({{cite legal}}, I'm thinking now) that then can be called into wrapper templates like {{cite court}}, {{cite patent}}, international variants, etc. Minor formatting tweaks that wrapping itself cannot handle can instead be controlled within the CS1 style using flag parameters, (for which iirc I coded one). It might turn out that the the supertemplate is actually sufficient to call as a standalone for anything law related, but I'm not sure (and either way I think users prefer subtemplates that are semantically explicit about the content they are citing, even if the code being called is identical).

tldr: the lua module is coded to apply as generally as possible, while I see the wrapper templates, as they already exist, can remain specific to the type of legal work being cited. SamuelRiv (talk) 21:44, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Would there likely be consensus to change {{cite court}} and {{cite patent}} to call to the new modules and templates? voorts (talk/contributions) 21:53, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

> (and either way I think users prefer subtemplates that are semantically explicit about the content they are citing, even if the code being called is identical).

I for one prefer it. And I'm heartened to see that my suggestion has been picked up and the community is running with it. ^_^ —DocWatson42 (talk) 02:04, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@SamuelRiv, just wanted to see where we're at on this. Best, voorts (talk/contributions) 16:02, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Hey, I'm busy all week with a move, but I just finished updating {{cite act}} to a proper wrapper template with the right semantics that I'd want for the CS1-based template to work. (I spent way too long on it since the plan is to write a new base template anyway.) I gotta run AWB to deprecate old parameter use, and also to fix some misuse of the EU templates I made last year. SamuelRiv (talk) 21:54, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard § RfC: Legal Insurrection

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard § RfC: Legal Insurrection. Mokadoshi (talk) 04:19, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Legal case is in dire need of sourcing

Can someone have a look at this article? Cheers! BD2412 T 15:48, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

It should be merged with Lawsuit. Currently Litigation is a redirect to the latter but, in my eyes, it should be the article with Legal case and Lawsuit as redirects to it. DeCausa (talk) 16:56, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

I think Legal case is a valid summary-style article, since it includes both civil and criminal cases, and a criminal case isn't called a "lawsuit" in common usage. Both Legal case and Lawsuit are in pretty bad states, though. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:42, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Exactly, a criminal case and a civil case are both kinds of legal cases, with many aspects in common (jurisdictional questions, proceedings, factfinders, processes for obtaining and admitting evidence). BD2412 T 22:17, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

It's difficult to say because "lawsuit" is an Americanism whereas "legal case" has wider usage across the anglosphere. Because of that, lawsuit and legal case is better wrapped up into "litigation" (which can be civil or criminal) which is the only word that avoids the whole WP:NOTDICTIONARY taint. DeCausa (talk) 22:40, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

We could also add Legal proceeding to the mix. IMO that might be the best home for a globalized BCA. I'm a little wary of smooshing all of these together without further deliberation, especially given that so many other Wikipedias also have separate articles. But I suspect that any encyclopedic distinctions between case/lawsuit/litigation/proceeding would be jurisdiction- or tradition-specific, so one general BCA might be the way to go. -- Visviva (talk) 03:09, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree that a BCA is needed. Litigation can redirect to Legal proceeding, which can be the top level article. Then, Criminal litigation and Civil litigation can be separate BCAs that are summarized at Legal proceeding, and each of those articles can be BCAs for different jurisdictions. I think lawsuit could then appropriately redirect to civil litigation. Before these changes are made, however, I think we need a formal move request with notification to all affected page. voorts (talk/contributions) 03:35, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

My current thinking is to propose merging legal case into legal proceeding and retarget litigation to that. I'll go ahead and post a merge discussion for that and we'll see how it goes. Agree that separate articles on civil litigation (currently a bad redirect) and criminal litigation could also be good; there's certainly plenty of subject matter for all of those. After taking a closer look at lawsuit, I think that should probably just be moved to Lawsuit (United States law) and then the original page turned into a redirect to a hypothetical civil litigation BCA -- but that's probably another issue for another time. -- Visviva (talk) 00:22, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

I generally agree, but I'm not sure why Lawsuit (United States) needs a separate page. Lawsuit is a generic term that is used for any kind of case brought by one entity against another. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:13, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

I guess I would say that we should have a "Civil litigation in X"-type article (among many others) for every jurisdiction X for which adequate sources exist. Even when the broad principles are similar, every jurisdiction's law is its own specialized subject area with its own sources and history. The US is only unique in that, thanks to the heavy US slant of our existing legal coverage, that article is pretty much already written -- it just needs to be untangled from the global concept. But anyway, I'm not proposing to do that just now. -- Visviva (talk) 01:50, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Legal cases as Primary vs. Secondary

I am working with an editor who believes that legal cases are secondary sources. To me it is common sense that such decisions are WP:PRIMARY. I didn't see it clearly mentioned in WP:RS or here on this project. Is there any place where it is spelled out more clearly? If there isn't one, we could use a section on good legal sources. I did see it discussed here: [15]. --David Tornheim (talk) 22:03, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

We have RSLAW (there's been some discussion recently about getting it to a better state). Cases are primary sources because their holdings are open to interpretation and their factual findings are based on what the parties present to the court and the court's first-hand evaluation of evidence. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:02, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

I am late to the party, but for the record I think our position has to be a bit more nuanced. I think the starting point for this discussion has to be WP:ALLPRIMARY. That is, any legal case (by which I'm assuming we mean court opinion) is a primary source in at least some respects. So how we're citing the opinion matters. In that regard, I would agree with voorts that a court opinion is always a primary source as to its own holding and legal reasoning, and probably also as to the procedural history of the case. But a court opinion would typically be secondary as to the background principles of law that the court is applying. Facts are a messier question analytically, although I think most would agree that a court opinion, regardless of whether it is "really" primary or secondary, should only be cited for the facts of the case with in-text attribution (and with great caution, if at all, outside of articles about the opinion).

The kind of court opinion we're talking about also matters. IMO trial court opinions should be probably be treated as if they were self-published primary sources, even when they have secondaryish aspects (not least because many such opinions, at least in US civil litigation, are drafted by the prevailing party). But an appellate court's recitation of background law should IMO be considered a fairly reliable secondary source for those points -- not least since it is, at least in the common law jurisdictions I'm familiar with, reviewed by multiple jurists before publication, and is the type of source on which experts in the field rely. If a particular area of law in a particular jurisdiction hasn't attracted scholarly attention, appellate opinions may be the best available source.

In general, context matters. And in that spirit I think we also have to keep in mind the general weirdness of the law relative to other fields. Sources Wikipedia considers generally reliable in other contexts are often comically bad about getting legal details correct. (See pretty much any news article about pretty much any litigation.) We would serve our readers poorly if we didn't take that inconvenient reality into account. But exactly how to take it into account is IMO a case-specific question. -- Visviva (talk) 02:37, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

But an appellate court's recitation of background law should IMO be considered a fairly reliable secondary source for those points -- not least since it is, at least in the common law jurisdictions I'm familiar with, reviewed by multiple jurists before publication, and is the type of source on which experts in the field rely.
I think the problem with that is that "an appellate court's recitation of background law" is often vague (usually a product of compromise among judges on a panel) and are sometimes left intentionally vague such that they are open to interpretation in a later case. For example, lawyers distinguish case law in their briefing and courts sometimes end up limiting doctrines or outright redefining them. While some propositions of law are so settled that they can't reasonably be open to a different interpretation (e.g., that a contract requires consideration), many legal questions are resolved through analysis and synthesis of ambiguous case law. This is why we should rely on secondary sources that analyze legal cases and trends and attempt to make sense of what's actually going on in judicial decisionmaking. voorts (talk/contributions) 02:58, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

I do not find the primary/secondary distinction to be very useful as applied to court opinions. As for the court's own holding, the opinion is obviously a primary source. But for other purposes, the distinction may not be so clear. For example, the findings of facts in a trial court's opinion is the judge's assessment after reviewing proposals from both sides. Is that really primary, or should it be considered secondary? What about the appellate opinion? There a panel of judges is reviewing the opinion below. In addition, one judge writes the draft opinion, but then it is reviewed by the other judges. That certainly starts to look very secondary.

I'm influenced here by my experience with Happy Birthday to You. For decades, the history of the song and its copyright were obscure, leading to claims of copyright ownership by Warner/Chappell Music. Professor Robert Brauneis in 2010 wrote an excellent article exploring the history and arguing that these claims were invalid. Litigation resulted, and a court conducted a detailed review that closely examined Brauneis's work. So at this point the most detailed, reliable, and scholarly source is the court's opinion. I would argue that that is a perfectly acceptable secondary source (although the article does not currently cite it as such).

I've also seen the argument that a court opinion is a secondary source for background law, and it does seem like there should be something to it. However, it does require a careful assessment of what is background law versus what is the court's holding. John M Baker (talk) 22:59, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

I think the facts are a primary source because they're the judge's interpretation of what the parties have presented, either on a motion or at trial. As we know, sometimes the facts presented at trial are not the full facts of what actually occurred, whether that be because the parties have selectively argued only specific facts or because certain facts have been omitted under the rules of evidence. Likewise, an appellate opinion is bound by the facts that were developed below. I also disagree that citing an opinion for background law is valid because the law changes; someone without access to or who does not know how to conduct a proper search of a legal database might find an appellate decision that says X as "background law", but without realizing that X was repudiated by a later court, or even a court of coequal jurisdiction (such as in the case of one intermediate appellate court creating a split with another). See also my comment above. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:15, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Facts are always at risk of being incomplete, even for the most reliable secondary sources. I also don’t think that the considerations you mention prevent an opinion from being a secondary source of background law, although you do highlight some reasons why we might ordinarily be hesitant to use that source. John M Baker (talk) 03:38, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

I think it's better to counsel not using opinions as sources. While an editor who is a lawyer should know how to parse out the law, an editor who has limited experience with law-related topics might not. It's better to avoid the issue of having editors trying to parse judicial opinions and extract points of law from them (which in my opinion is OR), when scholarly sources or treaties are usually available. Any differences in interpretations of the case law in those sources can be attributed and explained. voorts (talk/contributions) 03:55, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

As a practical matter, I suppose that is right, with perhaps a caveat for U.S. Supreme Court opinions. My points are (1) I don’t find the primary/secondary distinction a helpful way of thinking about it and (2) the findings of fact are often the best available source for the facts of a particular matter. John M Baker (talk) 04:14, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Even SCOTUS changes the rules though. Just last term, there was a case where they effectively overruled another decision while claiming they were just "clarifying" it. (Forgetting the name, but when I read the decision, I thought to myself thaat it was obviously a compromise opinion because some Justices wanted to overruled while others agreed with the outcome but didn't want to overrule.) I don't think it's wise to have non-lawyers relying on these cases as statements of the law without the benefit of outside analysis. voorts (talk/contributions) 11:46, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Notability of Kristina Baehr

There is a new article for an attorney Kristina Baehr. I'd welcome discussion of whether the article meets notability requirements. ScienceFlyer (talk) 15:56, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Can I get some help with Bathroom bill?

Hi all

I would really appreciate some help improving Bathroom bill, as far as I can see the main issues are

• It is extremely America focussed, there are many laws in the UK, France etc which are similarly aiming to exclude trans people
• There is no real historical context given, these kinds of arguments have been used for a long time (I added some more info on the talk page)

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 14:01, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Section on reasonable person article needs dire attention

Reasonable person#Personal circumstances needs attention, there is a lot of citation needed tags and blocks. Not all of these might be needed, I'm not an expert and wouldn't know any prominent cases or other sources to find, so I'll refrain from editing the section MarkiPoli (talk) 13:31, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Weight of evidence

Should there be an article titled Weight of evidence? Michael Hardy (talk) 18:06, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes, as a broad-concept article. My understanding is that it's not just the law that uses "weight of evidence" as a term of art. See, e.g., this article on risk assessment: [16]. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:49, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Agree that a BCA covering both scientific and legal uses of the concept would be ideal. On the legal side, it would be nice to have a section covering the "manifest weight of the evidence" standard of review (of which our coverage is currently almost nonexistent). -- Visviva (talk) 02:08, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Weight of evidence (how convincing the evidence is) seems duplicative of Burden of proof (how convincing evidence needs to be). SilverLocust 💬 03:06, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

They're not the same concept. The burden of proof describes who has to prove what. The standard of proof (e.g., beyond a reasonable doubt, preponderance of the evidence, and clear and convincing evidence) describes how probable the facts described by a party need to be. Weight of evidence describes how convincing a particular fact or set of facts are. For example, a jury might weigh the testimony of one expert to be more credible than another. Weight of the evidence (or manifest weight of the evidence) is also a deferential standard of appellate review. For example, in some jurisdictions, an appellate court is required to uphold a jury verdict so long as the jury can rationally reach that conclusion based on the evidence presented. voorts (talk/contributions) 03:21, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Standard of proof/burden of persuasion and burden of production are not identical concepts, but they are sufficiently related to be covered in one article. I am suggesting that the same is true of weight of evidence. SilverLocust 💬 04:02, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

But go ahead and create an article for it if you wish. SilverLocust 💬 05:54, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Kudos to everyone involved in burden of proof (law) for sure! It is a shining beacon of adequacy, at least as to the three closely-related legal systems it covers. (Check the legal systems covered in the altlangs to get a notion of how much larger an even partially globalized version of that article would be.) And I would agree that the burdens of persuasion and production, which are closely-related subtopics of the main topic of that article, are pretty decently covered there. In contrast, that article contains only a couple of brief mentions of evidence-weighing, and only in the context of a couple of specific US proof standards. Subtopics are one thing, but trying to squeeze in coverage of a merely related topic like this would IMO stretch that article to the breaking point.

I don't know if this is where you're coming from, but for me, there's an impulse to look at our coverage of legal topics, which in the cold light of day mostly runs the gamut from "literally nothing" to "somehow less informative than nothing", and think "I am an adequate Wikipedian and law-talking person, Wikipedia's coverage of legal topics is something I am part of, therefore our coverage of legal topics is also adequate." It hurts to confront the scale of what we're still missing, more than two decades on -- especially given that writing or revising even one core legal article is a bruising task. But even if we allow ourselves these comforting illusions from time to time, it's important to remember that they are illusions, that the work remains to be done, and that anyone seeking to do it should be encouraged. -- Visviva (talk) 02:15, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Hence why I am recommending it be expanded rather than starting another such article. SilverLocust 💬 03:57, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Leasehold estate § This article needs major improvements

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Leasehold estate § This article needs major improvements. This article is rated "High-importance" to WikiProject Law, but it is missing a lot of information, and the prose needs rewriting to be easily comprehensible to the average (non-lawyer!) reader. SmileySnail (talk) 23:53, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Request input on constitutional law topic: Content split proposal for 'separation of powers'

Valued fellow law contributors:

The separation of powers doctrine is a core principle of constitutional law in every Western-style legal order. As such, it is a shame that our article on the subject remains at 'start class' quality. It is deficient in legal analysis and generally unbalanced.

I have thus proposed splitting off what amounts to well over half the article into one titled 'branches of government' or similar. These parts are dedicated to describing the structure of individual governments, instead of analysis or a summary of the principle's manifestations (see Wikipedia essay: cargo cult editing for a description of the type of writing I mean). Also, there appears to be no comparative law analysis in the article, which is entirely focused on political thought; whereas, to my mind, an article called 'separation of powers' would mainly be about: (1.) the normative principle in political philosophy, (2.) its impact on political systems in reality, and (3.) its technical implementation through constitutional law.

(The second one of these certainly has its place in the article; but right now, the article just lists a number of countries in which government powers are divided, and what the bodies belonging to these branches of government are called. Yes, if the separation of powers principle had never been posited, we would not customarily sort bodies of government into mutliple branches. But each instance of a notionally divided government does not need to be listed in the article referring to the principle.)

I think creating a different article, focused on comparative government analysis of 'branched' governments, would allow both a fresh start for the separation of powers article (I may be able to provide a complete re-draft myself in a couple more years), and also drive qualitative improvments to the newly split article by putting it entirely in the scope of descriptive political science editors. The way things are, I think everyone is a little paralyzed by uncertainty on what the article is there for, since it is admittedly a huge topic with implications for many fields.

Readers will also have an easier time finding what they are looking for if we distinguish these differing focuses. There's clearly a lot of interest in institutions and branches of government as a topic in itself; it's probably worth its own article.

Please let me know what you think. If you agree with my assessment, I could really use your help building the necessary consensus to enact this change: I fear that all the POV editing going on in the WP:CARGO parts of the article might transform into obstructionism upon enactment of the change.

Thanks. —§§ LegFun §§ talk §§ 18:31, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Israel has an RfC on the topic: mention apartheid in the lead?

Talk:Israel has an RfC. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. starship.paint (RUN) 05:17, 2 June 2024 (UTC)