up vote 5 down vote favorite

Have a look:

These questions are asking for legal advice. For obvious reasons, I think we should decline to answer these. Opinions?

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sigh... every site quickly starts looking for questions that are not allowed in them... – jmfsg Nov 20 '10 at 23:16
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I think the questions themselves should be allowed. People answering those questions just have to be careful not to phrase it as if it is legal advice. Pointing people to the correct references and/or professionals would be appropriate. – Ash Nov 21 '10 at 0:12
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@Juan That's because it's better to be a focused, excellent community at one thing than a haphazard amoeba of a community that knows a little bit about a bunch of things. – StrixVaria Nov 21 '10 at 0:15
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@Juan That, and "Are questions about [subject] on or off topic?" is listed as the first "essential meta question of every beta". Every site is simply following instructions. – mootinator Nov 21 '10 at 1:27
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@Juan - Sites have to define themselves by determining what questions this site will exclude, and more importantly, what we will include. The off-topic questions are the negative space a site uses to define itself. In the example of this question, my opinion above (that we should disallow legal questions) really doesn't matter much. What matters is that the site users will discuss this and make a decision either way. – Neil Fein♦ Nov 21 '10 at 3:12

1 Answer

up vote 11 down vote accepted

I think these questions are common enough, and information about them important enough, that we shouldn't back away from them entirely. However, for the same obvious reasons you refer to, perhaps we can develop some rules / caveats. For example:

  • As @mootinator points out, few if any of us are lawyers. Any question about a "legal" issue on this site should be asked and answered with that implicit understanding.
  • To that end, I propose a legal tag to be rigorously applied to such questions, and appropriate disclaimers can be added to its tag wiki.
  • It can be a point of writers.stackexchange etiquette that answers to such questions focus on pointing the asker to relevant resources on the web or elsewhere - those provided by people who are lawyers, for example, or government Departments of Copyright/Trademarks - and avoid answers that appear to be unverified opinion.

My experience on SO and the other Exchange sites has been that the community can be effective at shaping how questions are asked and answered. Legal questions are a common and crucial part of Q&A for writers, and if this is going to become a premiere community for writers the way SO has for programmers, we'd do better to handle these questions with a steady hand on the rudder than to tell people to take them elsewhere.

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+1 for the legal tag – Axarydax Nov 20 '10 at 23:13

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