On Sat, 15 May 2004, Charles Matthews wrote:
Shouldn't there be a [[hard cases make bad law]] page?
Wik-law would be a disaster (Wik being a classic ''hard case''). Laws made just to legislate round Wik, which would be the normal interpretation, risk distorting the whole enterprise.
I'm still for resource-rationing here.
Thank you, Charles. In response to your allusion to law, I consulted my 1933 edition of _Black's Law Dictionary_, only to find myself distracted by finding & reading such entries as "Butler's Ordinance", "Mason Dixon's Line", & the fact that the words "in" & "is" both have legal definitions. Now I shall hate myself unless I can spend an hour or two this weekend browsing this book, rather than busy at more important matters (like contributing to Wikipedia).
FWIW, this is one of the older editions with the legal references (I understand that the latest editions removed them, a change that made this Dictionary less useful to lawyers). For example, the phrase "hard cases make bad law" (according to my copy of Black's) appeared most famously in Moore v. Pierson, 6 Iowa, 279, 71 Am. Dec. 409; & the related phrase "hard cases are the quicksands of the law" in Metropolitan Nat. Bank v. Campbell Commission Co. (C.C.), 77 F. 705.
Geoff