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.
Jay.