From: jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@wikipedia.org Message-ID: 6a8d9d700612180823s701590f2pcfe4bd97a2938ac6@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
On 12/17/06, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/17/06, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/17/06, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@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.
I'm happy that my question provoked some useful discussion.
"All legal experts believe that Y" would clearly be wrong, as it isn't even verifiable.
On the other hand, even though "Legal experts have stated that Y [cite][cite]" is clearly valid, it doesn't properly convey what the sources indicate. There ought to be some way to record that a standard legal database did not provide ANY contrary opinions. Given how much lawyers love to argue with each other, this is a highly unusual situation.
Perhaps there is another useful way to look at it: consider the legal database to be "the" source, rather than a collection of sources. Can I say something like "Legal opinions found in the LawIsUs database uniformly favor Y"? (The wording may need tweaking.)
Zero.
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