Talk:Dubitante

Fallon

Regarding the entry -- * Harvard Professor Richard Fallon believes judicial activism in areas of abortion rights could be seen as dubitante.<ref>http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10247/Fallon</ref> --

This ref to his bio does not support the statement made. It does not even mention the issue. A supporting cite should be provided or the entry deleted.

PraeceptorIP (talk) 20:39, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

 Done I marked it as Template:citation needed and an aggressive editor removed the text yesterday. jhawkinson (talk) 15:53, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Examples section

Hello, @Drmies: I think we're best off having a discussion here.

I didn't write the examples section and I haven't gone back through the history to see who did (perhaps you should engage them?), but I think this article, like most articles, is better off with some examples than with no examples. I don't know that these are the best examples, but they seem reasonable. You've said several things in your edit summaries that just aren't true, and appear to be holding up a slavish devotion to some of Wikipedia's style rules over making the article better. Remember the goal is to have a better encyclopedia, not necessarily to adhere strictly to every single rule on a start or stub -class article about an obscure topic.

Specifically:

• rm random selection of examples--random also because there are over 600 uses or whatever, and these have been picked by editors, not by way of secondary sources. As I said, these selections are not random, and many appear in the Czarnezki paper. Wikipedia doesn't require sources to be secondary sources, incidently, so please don't suggest that is the rule. But since the Czarnezki paper is a secondary source, that should please you. It's also short -- just seven pages -- so it's not as if it goes through all 600 Westlaw instances. Incidentally, per Lexis today, usage count is at 911 cases (paper says it was 600 in 2005, 13 years ago).
• sorry, but this is ridiculous. no, there is no secondary sourcing AT ALL for any of this, so it's some editor's pick. I just don't understand what you mean here. I think I was pretty clear in my reversion summary that there appears to be some sourcing (Restore examples. It is not generally true that they are picked by WP editors. Majors, Lesley, Reed, & Brady are all featured in the cited Czarnezki paper. Maybe that's not good enough, but then discuss on Talk, and the stated rv justification fails. I think this article is better with *some* examples rather than none.). If you disagree, please explain why, and do it on the Talk page before making disruptive edits.
• please copyedit, correct, or explain: either "assuming" is in the original, or it is added by the editor. This makes it sound like you didn't look at the source before changing the quote. That's really not acceptable at all. Further, it is not like there is some inviolable rule against an article using the word "assuming" outside of quotation marks. I agree that's not the prevailing style most of the time in Wikiepedia, but it is a citation style that is seen more in the legal world. It turns out the word "assuming" is in the original, though. Whew!
• Template:unreferenced section does not appear to do what you want here. It produces the message, This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed but clearly the section cites sources. Your complaint appears to be that it doesn't cite sources to the sources. I think that's a reasonably concern to have (though not one that tips the scales to removal), but please replace the template with text that articulates the problem clearly and correctly. I don't know if there is a template that does this well (an argument could be made for Template:Primary sources, though I'm not a fan), and maybe you need to just make your own box.

Thank you. jhawkinson (talk) 15:48, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

• • I think one of the problem here is poor citing practices--your "whew", pace that jab, "that's really not acceptable at all", I take to mean "you were right". And adding "assuming" without indicating, by way of square brackets or whatever, that this is an editorial addition, that's unacceptable. As for the template: the default is that content be verified by secondary sources, since that's how Wikipedia works. Drmies (talk) 15:53, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Err, no. We add text outside of quotation marks all the time. Most frequently as a paraphrase. We don't need square brackets because it is outside of the quotation marks. If run together with the quote, a paraphrase needs to fairly reflect the quoted material (just as it would in square brackets inside the quote). But nobody's even alleged that was untrue. So your statement, "that's unacceptable" is objectively false. Please don't make claims about the rules and style that are untrue.

As to your statement about secondary sources as "how Wikipedia works," I think you need to reread WP:PSTS and WP:PRIMARY. Among other things, "primary sources that have been reputably published may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them." But this discussion is bizarre because there is a secondary source, cited in the article, that lists many of these primary sources. Are you trying to say that source isn't good enough or reputable enough? Or are you just not reading it? I can't tell what your point is, and you've repeated the claim three times now, without real justification. Please explain the underlying basis for your concern. And no, the template you added doesn't say anything about secondary source verification; it's not a good fit for the problem you're attempting to raise here. Thank you. jhawkinson (talk) 16:04, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

"We add text outside of quotation marks all the time" is the real bizarre claim. Drmies (talk) 16:06, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

OK. There is a section called "examples". There are examples--six of them. Great. But only one of them has a secondary citation (well, it has this, "Id. Judge Easterbrook is one of the most frequent users of dubitante among those few judges who use the term. See supra note 4." of which just about every part is discouraged by our MOS). Secondary citations aren't necessary to prove that these things were said or written (I never said that), but to prove that they are noteworthy, that they should be included. If there are 626 examples of something, you can cite zero, or you can cite 626, but if you want to cite 5 you need to do so on the basis of a criterion--a secondary source, then, that indicates that this particular example is worth citing. It's not that the cases are unproven--it's that the selection is arbitrary. Drmies (talk) 16:13, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Dubious provenance

This looks like a neoclassicist legal latin creation. There is dubitatio In Roman Law, but it is unclear if the term is related or arose independently. The concept is similar, it refers to long standing legal controversies decided by the Institutes of Justinian. Examples are 2.1.13 (whether a wild beast becomes your property after you have incapacitated it or after you have captured it) and 2.1.34 (whether a tablet accedes [is secondary] to a picture, or the picture accedes to the tablet).

The author of the cited paper ("The Dubitante Opinion") notes that no English cases use the term prior to late 1700s cases written by American state court judges, and the term is not routinely used in English courts. --212.186.133.83 (talk) 02:27, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

References