On 12/17/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/17/06, jayjg <jayjg99(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/17/06, Stephen Bain
<stephen.bain(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Of course that's ok. Original research in
that scenario would be to
say "the consensus among legal scholars is A, but they haven't
considered C, and therefore D is the correct position."
Original research is about posing new theories, or making new
inferences, or drawing new conclusions that are your own opinions and
involve some element of analysis or synthesis. Fundamentally, original
research is introducing your own original thought into articles.
And, of course, drawing your own conclusions and stating that there is
a "legal consensus" on this matter, based on your own research into
what various legal scholars have said, is a prime example of original
research. Quote the scholars, list their names, state that there are a
number of them, but don't introduce your own original thought that
these selected sources have created a "legal consensus".
I was speaking to the particular example given, where there are two
popular positions on the subject held by lay people, while all expert
accounts support only one of those positions. In this context, where
all experts who have written on the subject have agreed with the same
position, surely it is not original research to say so.
On the contrary, it surely is. All of the people that this particular
investigator has found, and consider to be legal experts, have one
view, so it's fine to state something like "Legal experts have stated
Y", with a series of footnotes. However, one cannot go from that step
to stating "All legal experts believe that Y", since we have no idea
what *all* legal experts believe, only the statements of the ones we
happen to have surveyed. Even worse would be an insistence that we
must conclude that "the law is Y", since the law is complicated,
malleable, and context specific, and one often has no idea which way a
judge, panel of judges, or jury will rule.
Jay.