I’ve seen questions edited or closed in order to generalise them and edit out any reference to the original event that inspired and prompted the question. I suspect that this is because of the politically (though in principal not necessarily legally) controversial nature of the events.
Personally, the fact that the legal question gets tied to an ongoing current event makes the question more interesting and engaging for me, and furthermore it also oftentimes constitutes a significant part of the basis of the question in that what I’m wondering about is how the politically contentious nature of the subject matter may be addressed by the law.
But some users would seem to prefer to sidestep these controversial issues, but they don’t do so in a fully transparent and up front way as to their motivations and reasoning for proposing to do so: they simply make it a non chalant and matter of fact question of tidying up and improving on a question to make it more generally applicable, etc etc etc.
I think this is the case because questions about the copyright status of Mickey Mouse go fully undisturbed, presumably because they are not perceived as so controversial.
Not only are such questions more interesting, fun, and engaging, but they are often the actual question that not only the asker but likely other people are wondering and wanting answered. It’s not uncommon for high profile current events to give rise to popular legal questions among the legally untrained masses (OJ Simpson, Wayne Couzens, Saddam Hussein, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, Price Andrew, etc.) This is why countless popular press publications have “legal explainer” columns to elucidate such things exactly as such, to people.
On the one hand, I find it inappropriate if users mask their true intentions behind such pretences. On the other, if this is actually a valid reason for wanting to obscure questions, are we not needlessly stunting the popular appeal of our site?
