General title, body suggests jurisdiction, tag requires jurisdiction, terms imply jurisdiction but don't unambiguously say so

Question

Multiple issues brought up by What's the statute of limitation on fragging?

1. The title doesn't mention jurisdiction; the body gives a scenario of the US military and Vietnam but doesn't explicitly limit answers to that; the OP only tagged it military but later someone else tagged it united-states. (Impossible to tell if that was the OP's intent.)
2. Neither title nor body mentions 'UCMJ'. The body does say 'US soldier'; the title doesn't.
3. 'fragging' isn't exclusive to the US military, nor did it only happen in Vietnam

• Fragging was common in the Russian wars in Chechnya, and not unknown with the UK in Afghanistan, US in Iraq and presumably other wars unpopular with the troops.
• The term 'fragging' originated in Vietnam, but is now understood to refer in general to troops killing their commanding officer. But this title will cause confusion, some will think it is synonymous with both 'US military' and 'Vietnam'. If the OP's intent was to get answers for military jurisdiction in general, then at best the body will be confusing. People will be unlikely to post answers about Chechnya, Iraq etc. if they think they won't be upvoted or accepted.

I reviewed the 13 mentions of 'jurisdiction' + 'title' on Law.Meta but there isn't much clarity:

• Policy/consensus on how to indicate country/jurisdiction (in text, title or tags)? and in particular its accepted answer suggests "In fact, even if the asker specifies a jurisdiction, answers for different jurisdictions are welcome as they may be helpful to other visitors with the same question." (Regardless whether you agree with that or not, presumably clarity is better in the body and title).
• What should the asker accept, and how should we vote, for questions without a specified jurisdiction?
• also: When would a legal question need not include jurisdiction?

Anyway my personal recommendation for this specific question would be to change the title: "What's the statute of limitation on fragging?" to either "What's the statute of limitation on fragging under UCMJ?" or "...in military jurisdictions?" depending on the OP's intent. Yesterday I had left a comment saying "if you only want answers for UCMJ, then please edit the question to say that" but no response.

Answer 1

I disagree with your suggestion, because ad hoc solutions are not desirable and the problem that you mention is much more general. The proposal is ad hoc because it only addresses a marginal issue with that particular question, and does nothing to address the actual problem of unspecified jurisdiction as it exists on LSE. The existing problem is that we get questions that cannot be answered without assuming a jurisdiction – one which has no basis in the OP. To the extent that there is substantial variation in how jurisdictions treat the subject matter, this is a bad thing because the goal of SE is to ask questions that have a definitive answer, and people vote the question up or down based on correctness w.r.t. that one hypothetical answer.

As you will have detected from Meta discussion, there is no required jurisdiction formula for LSE where every question must specify a jurisdiction (I presume you understand why such a requirement would be highly impractical). Generally, we interpret the totality of facts in the question and do our best to come to a reasonable conclusion. The conclusion that this is about the UCMJ derives from the fact that the question contextualizes this by referring to a "US soldier". It is true that the author could have been thinking "I wonder how Australian law would treat this case", but there is no evidence for that contrary supposition.

There is and should be no requirement for absolute unambiguity of information provided or sought in LSE questions – that is an unreasonable requirement. People ignore jurisdiction clues all the time. People asking these questions are typically not competent to make jurisdiction decisions: "who has jurisdiction" is a complex legal matter that should not be stipulated without good reason. In this case, I see no evidence that the author had in mind some other jurisdiction.

It is also a bad idea to put too much stock in the title. We also have a substantial problem that questions are incoherent when the title asks one question and the body asks a different question. The body of the question should state the question, and the title is just an attention-getting summary.

Answer 2

It's the OP's question - they can phrase it how they like

If you believe it's a poorly phrased question, vote it down.

If you want to edit, do it within the guidelines

In particular (my emphasis):

• to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it

Since neither you nor I know what the OP had in mind with their overly broad question, I at least would be reluctant to make the type of edit you suggest because I would not be satisfied that I was not imposing my interpretation rather than clarifying the OP's.

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• Request clarification from the author;

• Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;

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