Jurisdiction Relevance to Questions

Question

The answer to questions relating to the law depend upon the jurisdiction of the issue. With this in mind would it be possible to configure the (law) site so that no question is asked without the jurisdiction being tagged to the question?

Answer 1

As a practical matter a feature like this (mandatory tag with custom list) would require special development. You could ply the idea on the Meta, but I can all but guarantee it will be declined unless it is considered broadly useful across many/large Stack Exchanges.

You should also review discussions of the jurisdiction question here, since there are a variety of views on the matter. I.e., it is not obvious that, even if such a feature existed, it would be desired on Law.SE.

Answer 2

There are some questions without jurisdiction, especially those about legal theory or comparative law. E.g.:

• What is the difference between civil and common law
• What countries have the longest copyright terms

Other times, a jurisdiction tag would be redundant: e.g. with us-supreme-court.

Answer 3

Although specifying a jurisdiction will certainly generate better answers, I think a reasonable alternative is for an answer to explicitly pick one or more jurisdictions. A good answer would give some indication of the range of variation, so in a question about free speech, one can show how certain laws are possible without the 1st, which cannot exist in the US (or any other country with an analogous constitutional protection).

A fair number of questions can be answered with a reasonable level of detail without depending on specifics of a single jurisdiction, for example, the numerous copyright questions which boil down to saying "I don't understand what copyright is".