Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Law

Blank pad rule

Do we have an article on this? Hawkeye7 (talk) 01:46, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Okay. Now we do. Thanks everyone. Hawkeye7 (talk) 21:51, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Lebanon

Can someone clarify what the situation is regarding Women's suffrage in Lebanon? There is a discussion here: Talk:Women's_suffrage#Lebanon. 2A02:2F01:501F:FFFF:0:0:5679:C2F4 (talk) 19:58, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Requesting edits on Marsy's Law

Hello, I have posted an edit request on the Talk page for Marsy's Law, the California Victims' Bill of Rights Act of 2008 article. Specifically, I'm asking for two proposed edits that would include a short overview of a similar Marsy's Law in Illinois. I have a financial conflict of interest (I work at Mac Strategies Group and am posting as part of my work there on behalf of Marsy's Law For All) so I am aware I should not edit the article. Can someone here take a look at my request and add this new detail to the article? Thank you. JulieMSG (talk) 22:12, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Would this person's death be considered a "homicide"? (Cross-wiki issues)

In regards to Death of Gabriel Granillo I would like to know if this death would be considered a homicide under the American definition/notion.

The girl who killed Granillo underwent a murder trial, but it ended in a hung jury. The dispute was over whether she intentionally killed him or not: she said she acted in self defense and was frightened, and the prosecution said she intentionally tried to kill Granillo to prove herself. She ultimately took a plea deal where she pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. She served probation, and the criminal charge was dismissed after probation ended.

It relates to the naming of the Spanish Wikipedia article: es:Muerte de Gabriel Granillo. A user told me that the girl should not be described as a "matadora" (Wiktionary says that this means "killer": Wiktionary:matadora) and that it would be a "homicide" (homicida). However while the right Spanish language terms need to be chosen, they also need to correctly correlate with the English-language legal system in Texas.

Should the death be described as a "homicidio" even though she was convicted of aggravated assault and not homicide? What should Benton be described as in Spanish? I'm posting it here and inviting ES.Wiki users here due to the likelihood of this venue having more knowledge of U.S. law. WhisperToMe (talk) 04:36, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Matar implies intention. The death should be called el homicidio, which means death at the hand of another (there is the term homicidio involuntario). Although she could neutrally be called la homicida as long as it is made clear of what she was convicted, I would stick with la acusada and la condenada (the convicted one) except when translating someone else's use of killer. In other words, use la homicida following the rules of WP:ATTRIBUTE and when speaking in the voice of WP use only acusada and condenada. μηδείς (talk) 05:30, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

See, for example, https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_O._J._Simpson where the term homicidio is used of the deaths, and Simpson's trial por asesinato. μηδείς (talk) 05:39, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Thank you so much for the answer! It's really helpful. I stand corrected about the words. I think "homicida" is the best choice. WhisperToMe (talk) 09:28, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Logo examples - Threshold of Originality

Would the addition of the CCC logos here and discussion thereof improve the article discussed at Talk:Threshold_of_originality#More_images.3F? Could use an expert opinion.--Elvey^(t•c) 20:41, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

When does a case deserve an article

Hello all, I've been contributing articles for most of the last year on (mostly) NZ court decisions. However I got wondering today whether there is a guide as to whether a case is notable enough for wikipedia. If there is please let me know. Otherwise I'd love to hear peoples suggestions as to what that guide could be. Atthebonfire (talk) 21:06, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

@Atthebonfire: I'm not usually on this wikiproject, but I popped over to ask a similar project about Australian cases! For what it is worth coming from a non-legal-topic editor, I think you'd have a good mandate for cases that had broad societal impact, or impact within the profession. The general importance guide for WP:LAW seems to suggest that cases that set precedence would class at least as as low-importance. Looking at the NZ case law category, there seem to be quite a spread already which might offer a guideline for what level has previously been tolerated for articles. I'm of course happy to be contradicted by editors with more specific knowledge in this are though! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 12:22, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Notification that International law has been selected as one of Today's articles for improvement

Hello, Please note that International law, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of Today's articles for improvement. The article was scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "Today's 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 00:12, 30 November 2015 (UTC) on behalf of the TAFI team

Help on templates and case links

Can I ask for some help in a debate: User:WilliamJE wants to delete all case links (to bailii, Eur-lex, or ussc reports) in drop down case templates such as these on English contract law or EU law:

This is really important that it does not happen for the development of law articles - as I hope you can see if you're also a lawyer: quick access to the primary sources. If anyone could drop a comment against this being deleted at the bottom on my talk page, this would be really appreciated. Wikidea 19:41, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Although I have not read the discussion on your talk page, I don't see how case links would be unhelpful or against policy. However, you should be careful how you phrase notifications like the one you posted above. Per WP:APPNOTE, when you inform editors of ongoing discussions, the notifications should be "neutral" and "non-partisan." I appreciate your efforts to broaden participation in the discussion, but I don't want to see you get in trouble for posting notifications like these. Best, -- Notecardforfree (talk) 19:55, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, for this response - and advice on wording, certainly not my intention. Wikidea 13:58, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

@Notecardforfree: You suggest that case links would be acceptable; I'd like to explore this. I know I had to read the opening sentence more than once to fully digest it. For example in the template on the right "sources on unfair terms" the first entry has a wiki link to Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, as well as an external link. The wiki link to the relevant article seems quite appropriate, but I don't think we encourage external links in such templates. Normally, external links are included in a specific section identifying them as such i.e. an external links section, or as part of a proper reference in a references section. I don't recall seeing external links included in either navigation templates or sidebar templates. The relevant guideline Wikipedia:Categories,_lists,_and_navigation_templates#Navigation_templates Specifically states Finally, external links should not be included in navigation templates. Is there some other policy that trumps this? (When I first read this I thought "case links" included things like links to other Wikipedia articles which are acceptable, but when I read closer I realized that it was specifically talking about external links)--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:48, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

@Sphilbrick: Here is a rather large (Over 100 links in it when fully opened) law case template without one single EL in it. {{US1stAmendment|press|state=expanded}} Just one, and I can supply many more, of Legal templates without EL in them....William, is the complaint department really on the roof? 14:58, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

William, as I trust you are familiar with the basic tenets of logic, existence of a template without an EL is not proof that ELs are prohibited. I agree that based on my understanding of policy a template should not include an EL; but I'd like to hear from others in case there are some exceptions I haven't yet learned about. This place has a lot of rules and I don't pretend to know all of them.--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:12, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Sphilbrick, WilliamJE, and Wikidea: when I wrote my previous comment, I was not aware of the guideline that states "external links should not be included in navigation templates". I certainly appreciate the rationale underlying the guideline, but one of the goals of Wikipedia is to connect people with useful information, and I think the presence of external links in navigation boxes will only help people learn more or help people connect with the information they need. In fact, the infoboxes for SCOTUS articles are designed to include external links to the full text of opinions and oral arguments (see, e.g., the infobox for Roe v. Wade). Infoboxes for other disciplines also often include external links as well (see, e.g., the infoboxes at JAMA (journal), Barack Obama, Pneumonia, and Wikipedia). For legal articles, I think that external links to the full text of cases would be particularly useful for practitioners who want to know more about the case (or if they want to verify the accuracy of information presented in a Wikipedia article). In any event, I think the benefit far outweighs any harm. -- Notecardforfree (talk) 19:07, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

In addition, it's worth stressing the "guideline" is just that - a good general rule, but not an absolute rule. In fact, we have a "template", as I pointed out before a couple of times that's specifically for external links. Please see, for example, here: Template talk:Ussc. We were trying to get this not just for US cases, but for all of bailii and ideally worldlii. It's really an excellent thing to be able to link articles quickly and efficiently to the neutral case reports, especially in templates. Wikidea 22:17, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

I totally agree that a guideline is short of an absolute rule. One of the reasons things we make guidelines is that this is a big place with lots of complicated situations, and it is virtually impossible to anticipate all possible cases. Thus, best practices are written as guidelines, with the expectation that, in some rare cases, exceptions may occur. However, an exception should be accompanied by a darn good reason. While "help people learn more" sounds like a good reason on the surface, in my opinion it isn't strong enough. I contend that, with the exception of intentional vandalism, virtually every edit made to this encyclopedia meets that goal. Yet, we revert thousands of edits every day. I think we need something a lot stronger to justify not following the guideline.

Let me explain further, so I do not come across as simply a slave to rules. Everyone who spends a bit of time reading Wikipedia comes to learn a number of things about the format. One of the things they learn is that Wikipedia articles of full of links. These links bring you to additional information about the subject. They will also learn that clicking on the link will bring you to somewhere else in Wikipedia with two exceptions. First, on occasion there will be a link that goes to an external site. These won't be scattered throughout the article, but collected in a specific section with a clearly identified section heading called "external links". We follow a paradigm that readers are not brought outside of Wikipedia unless it is obvious that they will be brought outside of Wikipedia. The external links section is one such example. The other main example is the reference section. While we allow just about anyone to edit Wikipedia, we try to make Wikipedia as reliable as possible by insisting on references for important information. Because we want these references to be reliable, and almost by definition Wikipedia itself is not reliable, references should be to external sources.

I don't know that what I just wrote above is explicitly written out somewhere but I believe virtually all readers of Wikipedia come to understand this paradigm. References contain links to external reliable sources. Other links, except for those specifically designated as external links will bring you elsewhere to Wikipedia.

I'm sure we can all find examples of articles that violate these rules but in most cases it is simply because editors haven't gotten around to fixing them. With the exception of a few legal articles which have recently been brought to my attention I don't recall any widespread examples of templates that contain external links or articles that have external links in the main text. For this reason, the possibility that we would decide that certain articles are exempt from this rule is actually a big deal. If accepted, it means that readers of Wikipedia have to understand that we have a paradigm that applies in about 5 million articles, but a handful follow a different paradigm, and there may be links that go to external sources in templates not clearly identified as external links, and there may be references which do not actually go to a reliable source but go to another Wikipedia article. I think we would need an RFC to get approval for this exception and I cannot imagine that it would gain consensus.--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:50, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps you didn't already, but please do check this out, the template especially for law pages, and especially for external links: Template:Ussc - been there for ages, like the drop down boxes. Wikidea 10:51, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikidea asked for my input. In short, my thoughts are these. (1) Should we have external links in templates to transcripts of judgments? No. If someone wants to read the judgment for X v Y, then they can go to the article about X v Y. That's the only place they "need" the external link. We don't need links to the judgment for X v Y on the article for X v Y every other single article upon which someone has slapped the template. That looks like linkspam to me. Let's say we have a template with 30 articles in it. 30 articles, 30 cases, used 30 times, each time with 30 external links. 900 total external links! Complete overkill. (2) Should we have red links in references? Well, why not link instead to a secondary source to establish the point that is being made, rather than interpret the primary source of a legal decision? After all, in many instances there will be considerable debate as to whether / to what extent X v Y establishes proposition Z. And if there is no debate, then a citation to a reliable secondary source won't be difficult to find, will it? Bencherlite^Talk 08:16, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Directive 2014/41/EU and the European Investigation Order

It looks like the directive is about this order. Why is it not mentioned in the article? --Ysangkok (talk) 21:03, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

2015 Wootton Bassett SPAD incident‎

With the news that prosecutions are to follow in the wake of the 2015 Wootton Bassett SPAD incident‎, presumably this article now falls under the scope of WP:LAW. Addition of suitable categories to the article would be appreciated. Mjroots (talk) 20:20, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Primary carer

There is an article called Primary carer. It carries no citation and on 23 November 2015 an IP editor altered the lead and some of the other text with this edit. I have no idea if it is accurate, but the change seems to be in sympathy with "Fathers' rights activists scale roof at Buckingham Palace" (30 November 2015). Can someone who actually knows the law and/or has access to legal references please clean up the article up and add a few citations because at the moment it carries none at all and so is wide open to unbalanced POVs. In this case the IP changes seem to be at odds with at least one British Government web page: Apply for a derivative residence card, but I do not know enough about the subject to be able to give an overview with citations that the article clearly needs. If indeed it is a legally outdated concept, as suggested by the IP, then the article may be better off as a redirect to a section in another article.

-- PBS (talk) 22:51, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Royal justices

We have a fair few articles in which English people are described as having been royal justices. (I've linked quite a few of these: see here). However, we don't have an article on what a royal justice might have been. To say I am not a historian or a lawyer is putting it mildly. As far as I can see, they were royal officials who circulated around the country acting as representatives of the king, and dealing out the king's law among the people, like a Roman governor traveling the provinces -- or possibly Judge Dredd. They seem mostly to have been a phenomenon of the Angevin era, and various web sources suggest that the institution led to the development of the common law system. So that seems really interesting. Would someone be interested in creating an article about this? -- The Anome (talk) 23:22, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

I've now created a stub at Royal justice. Please let me know whether this is correct, or am I wildly wrong about this? -- The Anome (talk) 16:01, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Greville Janner, Baron Janner of Braunstone

The article Greville Janner, Baron Janner of Braunstone is still marked on its talk page as sub judice. Does Janner's death instantly bring all court action to a halt, or do the courts have to go through some procedure to cancel the legal action before the case can no longer be regarded as sub judice? Is it even possible that the trial of the facts or some other form of official investigation might survive his death, and if so, would sub judice apply to that? -- The Anome (talk) 15:38, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

• There will be no trial of the facts. Unlike in some other countries - an example in Russia from a couple of years ago springs to mind - the criminal courts of England and Wales do not allow dead people to be prosecuted. The court case will be closed administratively, without the need for a further hearing. Bencherlite^Talk 08:04, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Mitchell Hamline School of Law

On December 9 two law schools Hamline University School of Law and William Mitchell College of Law merged . The cleanest way to complete this appears to be to merge both source schools into a brand new article, Mitchell Hamline School of Law. Your input or contribution would be appreciated. Tiggerjay (talk) 02:41, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

While Hamline isn't that old, Mitchell is fairly old and thus probably has some decent history. I think the better option would be to create the Mitchell Hamline article and incorporate some information on the two schools' histories via summary style, rather than merging, and retain both articles more to discuss the history of the two schools... and possibly going forward if they maintain fairly distinct campuses. However, judging by the quality of the content at the Hamline article, it would probably be better to just redirect it. Generally speaking, care should be taken because the whole issue of what the merged school will look like is bound to change in the coming years. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 04:13, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Clyde cancer cluster

Hello, people of WikiProject Law. I've created this message to notify active members of the project. I need help improving my article about the Clyde cancer cluster, an incident that Whirlpool was sued for in two court cases (even though the article doesn't yet talk about the second court case, see the end of this message for the link to more explanation of this). It is definitely not a bad article. It just needs some small improvements. I'm not at all saying minor edits or improvements are bad, but I'm specifically looking for people who can help me long-term with a lot of co-research to improve the article to reach Good Article status. If you're interested in helping, the things needed to be improved are listed on Talk:Clyde cancer cluster#Improvements. In other words, more material needs to be added to improve the article, and I want more people to edit because I feel like I'm the sole editor. Regards, Philmonte101 (talk)

Referencing case law

I have just created a quick stub on R v Pittwood - but to the untrained eye it looks unreferenced. How can one add a source for it other than the law report? GiantSnowman 13:40, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Done. I just grabbed something off Hein. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 09:25, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Does Kaufman v. McCaughtry apply to "Religion = Atheism" in Wikipedia infoboxes?

There is an RfC at Template talk:Infobox#RfC: Religion in infoboxes concerning what should be allowed in the religion entry in infoboxes. In the discussion section, someone wrote that "In the US atheism has been defined as a religion for governmental purposes, and, on that basis, for all practical purposes does not qualify as a 'nonreligion'."[1]

I believe that this is based upon this case:

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit. James J. KAUFMAN, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Gary R. McCAUGHTRY, et al., Defendants-Appellees. No. 04-1914. Decided: August 19, 2005 ( http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1467028.html )

I have two questions.

First, is it worthwhile having a Wikipedia page on this legal decision?

Second, is this a valid argument for the purposes of the Wikipedia RfC in question?

I am really over my head on this one; an engineer trying to figure out legal questions is a lot like a typical lawyer trying to design a microprocessor... Any help would be most appreciated. --Guy Macon (talk) 12:41, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

GMO lawsuits

I have not dealt with the proper way to do case citations and legal briefs of key cases in Wiki articles. Could someone review my work here? Thanks --David Tornheim (talk) 14:21, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

WP:RX holdings

I just added a number of US legal textbooks to Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Shared Resources#Law, and I have two questions/recommendations:

1. Does WP:LAW currently have any link to this collection? If not, I think it might be useful to include at Wikipedia:WikiProject Law/Resources. Any thoughts on this?
2. I'm certain there are others here at WP:LAW who would be able to expand this collection. My library got flooded a few years ago and I lost a good set of US law books including some really fundamental ones (Contracts, Constitutional Law, and Civil Procedure spring to mind), so if anyone could expand the resource coverage in that direction that would be much appreciated. Likewise, there is a lot of room for expansion in foreign (esp. civil law regimes) and alternative law (e.g. canon, talmudic, and sharia law; historic legal systems, etc.)

Thanks in advance for your help with this. -Thibbs (talk) 16:28, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Category:Members of the Faculty of Advocates has been nominated for discussion

Category:Members of the Faculty of Advocates, which is within the scope of this WikiProject, has been nominated for renaming to Category:Scottish advocates. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:23, 24 January 2016 (UTC)