Talk:Law

I've made some hasty changes to the second paragraph to get out the statements that were not true for U.S. law, but this article needs a lot of work. I suggest that everyone interested in working on it (including, of course, the original author, and thanks for such a good start -- I really like the international approach) touch base here to coordinate their efforts, either by working on separate sections at the same time or by taking turns at the whole thing. I'd like to see this article become the showpiece of the Law Workgroup, so when it gets to a place where my experience editing legal articles would help, let me know, and I'll go over it. -- k kay shearin 21:31, 22 February 2007 (CST)

This article, a typical Wikipedia article, attempts to sum up every major area of the law in one article, and as a result simply cannot succeed in providing a clear exposition of any of them. Why should an article about discipline X take the form of a list of definitions of all the subdisciplines of X? It shouldn't. See Biology for a different approach. The topic of the article is not "categories of law," but instead, law. Hence (I think) it should dwell quite a bit on the philosophical question, "What is law?" and introduce some of the problems and subdisciplines of law as part of an interesting narrative about the law. This is difficult, but it's only such an article that will actually satisfy a demand for an article with the title "law." The function of this article is not to act as a table of contents to the rest of law-related articles, but to introduce the topic named in the title, for people who presumably need an introduction. Imagine, for instance, trying to explain what law itself is to a college student who is considering studying the law. I don't have any specific suggestions as to how the article might be structured, but I do think that at present it lacks anything like an interesting, cohesive narrative that might make someone actually want to read it from beginning to end. --Larry Sanger 17:29, 23 February 2007 (CST)

I agree with Larry Sanger, the Wikipedia article is a mess, and should probably not be inserted. What we really need is someone with a background in jurisprudence, or who has at least taken a jurisprudence class (I haven't), to give a basic philosophical overview of what law is. I might be able to add something on law in pre- written language societies when I'm a little less busy. Scott Dubin

In case this helps, Black's law dictionary 8th edition says law is: "law. 1. The regime that orders human activities and relations through systematic application of the force of politically organized society, or through social pressure, backed by force, in such a society; the legal system <respect and obey the law>. 2. The aggregate of legislation, judicial precedents, and accepted legal principles; the body of authoritative grounds of judicial and administrative action; esp., the body of rules, standards, and principles that the courts of a particular jurisdiction apply in deciding controversies brought before them <the law of the land>." Scott Dubin

I was the person to first start (copy and paste) this lemma, primarily to entice the other people in the Law workinggroup to help improve it. However, the forum topic I started hasn't yielded any response up to now and I just found there was a discussion going here. I will summarily repost what I wrote at the forum;

I copied the law article from WiKiPedia as a place holder. The question is do we think this article should be amended or completely rewritten? Either way I think we should split up this article as it is too long. It might be an idea to make a short page on what divisions can be made within the field of law; Civil law / Common law - and subdivisions in criminal-, contract-, property-, administrative- and constitutional law. And make every subdivision a separate article. An article on law should not delve in too deeply on the material side of legislation, but rather have a general overview with links to in-depth articles.

And finally I think we need to have an article explaining the notion of le principe de la séparation des pouvoirs, because the current explanation is too flimsy I think. Frank