On 12/18/06, zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com wrote:
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.)
The problem is that material we use as sources must be available to the general public, and it's not clear that we can expect the public to have access to a legal database. Also, we have to depend on you having conducted the search correctly, which you may not have done if you have no legal education; and we have to depend on you correctly describing the opinion that you say is uniformly favored, which you may also not have done.
If it's as unusual as you say it is to find no legal opinion against, then someone else is likely to have written about that, so you can look for a secondary source and quote it. If no one has written about it, perhaps it's not so unusual, or perhaps it's of little interest, or perhaps it's not accurate. It's for these reasons that secondary sources are preferred to a Wikipedian's interpretation of primary sources in any area that's disputed.
Sarah