Talk:Law of the United States

message: Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, I think information about US legal encyclopedias (at least, the ones thar are online) may be a good further reading tool.--93.41.98.177 (talk) 11:28, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: yes please do.  If they are found in university libraries include major paper editions too. Rjensen (talk) 11:47, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  May we include a list of US legal encyclopedias? 

message: I saw this article referred to in a complaint board, not sure which one (ANI?)
There is no section on practical matters, such as in the USA, the loser pays the lawyers only in the national court system but this is often waived.  There is no mention about the litigenous nature of US society either.  Or the futility of being your own lawyer unless you want to lose.
There is also no information about regulations.  If you break a regulation, you can pay a huge fine, sometimes enough to bankrupt you.  Where do regulations fit in.  Are they laws?
Does these practical matters have a place in this article or is it just a stuffy recital of academic information?  Although ownership of articles is discouraged, it does happen.  Who is the owner here?  If you, please answer.  I am curious and do not advocate one answer or another. Suomi Finland 2009 (talk) 21:14, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The first issue you raise about the American Rule is a good point and I will expand the civil procedure section to add a link to the appropriate article in the next week or so (as well as a mention of class actions, another unique feature).  The issue of regulations and their force of law is already covered (read the article again).  The issue about the dominance of law and litigiousness in U.S. society is also a good point, but that will take me a while to find a source for that, though I know they exist since I saw a few while researching Lawyer.  The issue of self-representation isn't really appropriate here because that's a problem universal to all legal systems and is already addressed briefly in a sourced passage in the Lawyer article. --Coolcaesar (talk) 07:59, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  no practical section 

message: Here's why some of Rorschach's edits don't make sense:
*"Circumscribing" is the correct word rather than "limit."  Limit carries a connotation of bluntness which circumscribing does not.  Federal preemption of state law is a tricky business that is far too complex to be summed up by the word "limit."
*"Supreme law of the land" is preferable as that is the text actually used in the Constitution.
*U.S. law has incorporated some civil law innovations, but by no means many.  For example, our so-called codes are mere compilations of statutes and are largely a harebrained incoherent mess compared to their civil law counterparts.
*The federal preemption in aviation and railroads is fairly powerful, compared, for example, motor vehicle law, which is shared between federal and state law.
*Rorshach's "Federal courts can create federal common law as case law" creates ambiguity as to whether federal common law can be created as anything else.  Keep in mind the audience for this article may have NO legal training at all. The original syntax correctly implies that it can be created only in the form of case law.
*"Can do without" is a casual idiom, like "I could care less," that is both vague and carries a grossly inappropriate tone for a formal encyclopedia article.  
*Rorschach butchered the sentence discussing the Erie doctrine by deleting the word "decisional."  That word is essential because it is the entire point of the Erie doctrine!  (Which in turn is one of the most important components of a course in American civil procedure.) No first-year law student (who passed civil procedure) would make that mistake.  
* Federal agencies don't merely issue regulations, they promulgate them.  Issue is a vague word that can apply to all kinds of official (or unofficial) acts; promulgate is a precise one that applies only to official regulatory acts of bureaucracies.
* The phrase "individual judges" is essential to implying that followers of the natural law theory saw law as existing in the abstract and apart from any human being's subjective perception.  "What each judge said" doesn't carry quite the same connotation.
* Justice Scalia consistently denounces judicial lawmaking (as recently as three weeks ago) as "anti-democratic," not "undemocratic." --Coolcaesar (talk) 23:28, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problematic edits by Rorschach I just reverted 

message: I see nothing in United States legal system that needs to be merged here.  It appears to be the disorganized ramblings of a lay editor not from the U.S. based on surfing other articles on Wikipedia about various aspects of U.S. law and U.S. courts. --Coolcaesar (talk) 21:52, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: It's been over a week. No response.  I'm dropping that useless merge tag. --Coolcaesar (talk) 05:01, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, but next time, please remove the merge templates from all the involved articles. Thank you. –pjoef (talk • contribs) 07:25, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merge unnecessary 

message: The correct citation is:
"The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, whether federal or state, though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose, since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment, and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it.  No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it."  16 Am.Jur.2d § 256.
It's cited and recognized in many court cases.
Evolve-0r-Die (talk) 07:48, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Correct Citation 

message: Wikidea created a whole bunch of empty sections on 30 August 2016. Over five months have elapsed. It is abundantly clear that no one with the training, knowledge, and experience to write such sections (e.g., myself) has the time, energy, or inclination to actually write them, let alone add citations to supporting sources.  Any objections before I pull those sections out? I propose to retain the links to the relevant in-depth articles but transfer them to the See also section. --Coolcaesar (talk) 19:16, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Never mind --- it looks like Wikidea has pulled those sections out. Thank you.  I don't have any problem with those sections if and when someone gets around to writing them, but I do have a problem with the article looking like an incomplete mess with empty sections.  --Coolcaesar (talk) 17:58, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Planning to remove the empty sections created by [[User:Wikidea]] on 30 August 2016 

message: I'm removing that unsourced and incorrect statement about the distinction between public and private law in American law. That's clearly a European concept and not an American concept, as any conflicts scholar is well aware. The distinction between public and private law in American law is between laws of general application and laws of specific application (private bills), such as the laws that were used to charter corporations on an ad hoc one-on-one basis before general incorporation laws were invented. --Coolcaesar (talk) 02:36, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Public v. private law? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Us laws are based on roman law. Use of the bible does not imply Christian way is used to make decisions rather that the person has a belief system.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.169.78.191 (talk) 14:46, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: us legal system

message: This article appears to be about _federal_ laws, whose scope is far more limited than laws enacted by legislatures of the individual states. But the lay (non-lawyer) reader, or even lawyers in countries whose systems are quite different, may fail to realize some things that it seems it would be useful to state explicitly in the lead section: Most cases before courts of law in this country are not federal but concern matters over which state legislatures have authority and Congress does not. Each state has its own criminal code dealing with things like murder, rape, battery, theft, burglary, fraud, etc. (In sharp contrast with Canada, where all that is federal.) This probably seems like a kindergarten-level point to American lawyers who edit this article, but even intelligent and educated people in other countries reading this may be unaware of it, and within the U.S., the extent to which most non-lawyers understand this is less than ideal, to say the least. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:14, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: That was partially explained under this article's former treatment of state law (most of which was drafted by me). Then some genius (see discussion above) had the incredibly foolish idea of moving most of that material to another article. I am too busy litigating class actions to drag the editor responsible through the time-consuming ArbCom process to obtain appropriate remedies, so that is why this article remains a mess. --Coolcaesar (talk) 03:24, 13 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shouldn't this article inform a worldwide audience? 

message: I just reverted those edits because it's clear User:VaultNet101.2 is unaware of the debate we had over this issue over five years ago. 
This is exactly why I thought User:Int21h's move to separate the detailed state law content into a separate article was a really bad idea. Any decent American lawyer is going to look at this article and immediately realize it's catastrophically incomplete without a summary of the chaos in American state law and how the Restatements, uniform laws, and codification amount to a badly incomplete solution.  So those lawyers are going to keep trying to add that information back in.  
The fundamental problem is that the topic of American law is irreducible in complexity.  Try to reduce it too much and then your summary ends up fatally incomplete.  Even the OECD has complained about how American law is too complex and how that drives the cost of legal services through the roof. 
The best solution is to merge State law (United States) back into this article. --Coolcaesar (talk) 03:11, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: This article will be swallowed whole if we merge US state law into this article. Their diversity and complexity far outpaces that of the federal government, and merger would invite that incoherence and complexity into this article. It'd be like merging the EU member state law articles into the European Union law article. They are different jurisdictions. The State law (United States) article is a better place to start with such material, and reincorporate it here; this article's relevant section(s) should reflect what is there, and vice versa. int21h (talk · contribs · email) 03:22, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good faith edits by [[User:VaultNet101.2]] 

message: To whom it may concern,
The opening line of the "Law of the United States" page has been quite clearly vandalized. It reads as follows: The law of the United States comprises many bananas. bananas are great things that have happened in life.
I am not the person to resolve this, lest I produce an edit that makes even less sense than the one above. However, I considered it something of a civic duty to bring attention to it, in the hopes that the next person who is painfully behind schedule on their research paper is not needlessly impeded by such villainy.
To the person who might be capable of fixing this: you are the hero humanity needs, but does not deserve.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.78.52.100 (talk) 01:40, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vandalism of this page 

message: I just caught and reverted some fairly severe vandalism to this article from 3 March 2019 that no one caught.  This article should be permanently protected indefinitely from edits from any editor who does not have a well-established account. --Coolcaesar (talk) 01:19, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article should be permanently protected 

message: Greetings!  Regarding this revert...Wikipedia law articles are not written for lawyers; they are written for a general audience, especially overview articles like this one. There is a general mandate to explain jargon, and this abbreviation was something, even having taken a law class in college, I had to look up.  Wikipedia also has the benefit of not being paper, so we can take the space to expand abbreviations that would otherwise be confusing. Thanks, Beland (talk) 01:27, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: But see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Legal.  We follow the "legal citation convention for the jurisdiction that handled the case."  The Bluebook consistently abbreviates "rehearing" to "reh'g."  (See pages 30 and 501 of the 20th edition.)  --Coolcaesar (talk) 19:01, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Abbreviations in citations 

message: There are two types of federation 
1) holding together 
2) coming together
America like country comes to holding together federation due to his federal type of law and order and other things 2409:4081:79F:3A28:0:0:13A4:B0AC (talk) 10:24, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Types of federation