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We have a tag. I honestly don't know what its intended purpose is meant to be because it has no tag wiki or excerpt. Worst of all, there's really no clear pattern between any of the questions that currently have the tag. It seems to be used for questions which are about the law, but that's the entire site so... what is the point of the tag?

Can we come up with some better, more specific tags for the questions using it? Many of them were probably added because the asker simply didn't know what tags to put on the question, or how to properly name the tag they were envisioning in their mind. So the question just ended up with a vague free-for-all tag.

If this tag does have some purpose which I'm not seeing, perhaps it could be renamed to be more specific about what types of questions it's targeting? Also, a tag wiki and excerpt would be extremely useful.

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  • This beta is ripe for a tag overhaul. Any good ideas for promoting and/or organizing such a project? Past lessons learned? Etc.?
    – feetwet Mod
    Jul 16, 2015 at 3:12
  • I can't see any theme that joins the questions using legal-concepts. I support removing it. Everything on this site is a legal concept.
    – user248
    Jul 16, 2015 at 3:42
  • @nomenagentis Do you think there's a possible use case for it?
    – jimsug
    Jul 16, 2015 at 3:45
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    @jimsug I can't imagine one at the moment. On closer inspection, it seems that a fair chunk of the questions tagged legal-concepts are actually definition questions, but let's retag those definition, if anything.
    – user248
    Jul 16, 2015 at 3:47
  • @nomenagentis What about law.stackexchange.com/questions/113/… ? Do you think this is a valid use of it?
    – jimsug
    Jul 16, 2015 at 4:00
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    @jimsug In that example, perhaps "legal-theory" would be more descriptive.
    – user248
    Jul 16, 2015 at 4:51
  • @nomenagentis - IMHO this is a philosophical question and not a legal question at all. It deals with the distinction between those acts that are legal by codification or common-law vs. things that are wrong morally.
    – gracey209
    Sep 7, 2015 at 20:32

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I'm removing from questions

Where they don't already have other tags, or those other tags are inadequate, I'm re-tagging with something a little different.

As nomen agentis has pointed out, a fair few of these are definitions questions. I'm tagging these as such.

There's a possible use case for them when comparing two legal concepts, maybe.

Please, please comment or ping me in chat if you disagree.

I have now left the below comment on all of the affected posts - apologies for the post bumping.

Tags on question edited as per meta post

If you have been affected and would like to make a case for the tag staying on your question, then please, do so here! Like the rest of you, the moderation team is still finding its feet. However, this particular tag has already been the subject of discussion and it's generally agreed that it didn't really help sort or categorise the questions, with the caveat re: definitions above.

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  • The tag might be useful for collecting questions that address foundational, universal concepts and doctrines. If used for that purpose, it would never used alone. Thus one could do a search for posts tagged 'legal-concepts' and 'damages' and hopefully that would pull in less than 'damages' alone.
    – daffy
    Jul 19, 2015 at 19:14
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    The idea would be that the more situational questions should omit the legal-concepts tag, the more theoretical or philosophical ones should include it. And if a specific question winds up generating an answer that explains a great deal of background doctrine, it could be added in retrospect. Another way to go would be to restrict its use to moderators who could use it to create a subset of posts that contain useful explanations of major concepts and doctrine.
    – daffy
    Jul 19, 2015 at 19:14
  • Could we do something that seems less broad than legal-concepts, like legal-doctrines instead, then?
    – jimsug
    Jul 19, 2015 at 21:18
  • That would make sense to me, although 'concepts' might still be the better word from the perspective of a legal pedant (as concepts includes terms, doctrines and theories.) ' Maybe 'legal-foundations' although that's kind of unintuitive (and might confuse people who think 'non profit organzation' when they read 'foundation' in that context.)
    – daffy
    Jul 20, 2015 at 22:38
  • @daffy If you feel like jumping into chat, perhaps we can discuss this at a bit more length?
    – jimsug
    Jul 20, 2015 at 22:39
  • Definitely willing! but a bit busy today.
    – daffy
    Jul 20, 2015 at 22:40
  • Fair enough. Basically - even though you know what legal-concepts means, laypeople have in the past taken it to mean "a legal thing I don't understand completely and have a question about", which makes the tag rather useless for categorisation :/
    – jimsug
    Jul 20, 2015 at 22:41
  • How do you "ping" (is this like an IM?) someone?
    – gracey209
    Sep 7, 2015 at 20:35
  • @gracey you can mention people with an @ before their username if they've commented on the post, or authored it.
    – jimsug
    Sep 7, 2015 at 21:27
  • ohhh...that what a "ping" is, lol! I've been doing that and didn't even know
    – gracey209
    Sep 7, 2015 at 21:30
  • @gracey Yup. You can do the same thing in chat, too. The official SE nomenclature is @-mention, but I think ping is used as well. Doing it in chat is more limited though, to people who have recently been in that room.
    – jimsug
    Sep 7, 2015 at 21:32
  • WOOPS! posted this as an answer for a second there. Anyhow, I've only gotten into chat's when invited. I don't really know how to initiate. I tried once, a while ago, and I didn't do it right.
    – gracey209
    Sep 7, 2015 at 21:34
  • The Sidebar is the chatroom for Law SE. It's the third place, feel free to jump in to discuss things. I'm a big believer in having a good core of users in there.
    – jimsug
    Sep 7, 2015 at 21:38

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