Talk:legal right

RFD
SOP to me. Jamesjiao → T ◊ C 03:16, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, one of the common senses of legal, one of the common senses of right. These senses are used with other words, such as legal duty, legal obligation, human right, internationally recognised right (and so on). Renard Migrant (talk) 12:37, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Is there some kind of pronunciation rationale for keeping this? I'd like to hear it, if there is. DCDuring TALK 13:36, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Is there any kind of rationale for keeping this? Renard Migrant (talk) 14:58, 8 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete. Lawyer hat on. A legal right is nothing more than a right that is established by law, therefore, legal. Pronunciation is no different from any other collocation of "legal" (legal obligation, legal ownership, legal party), or any other collocation of "right" (moral right, divine right, economic right). bd2412 T 15:38, 8 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete (especially since even BD thinks so!). Equinox ◑ 18:56, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
 * If there is a reason to keep this, it is not because of idiomatic use in law, it would be because of its possible idiomatic use in ordinary discourse, IMO, or, possibly, political or philosophical discourse, for which legal expertise would not be germane. That it is a common collocation, there can be no doubt. For example, dictionaries at OneLook have it, at least as a redirect. Wordnet and its followers have included it and defined it as we have: "A right based in law." DCDuring TALK 20:06, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I will admit that I sometimes hear of people insisting on having a "legal right" where one does not exist ("I have a legal right to [speak through a bullhorn next to your house at 3 AM / openly carry a handgun in WalMart / refuse to pay income tax]"). This doesn't change the definition of the term, or make it idiomatic, any more than a person claiming to be the rightful King of Spain makes them the rightful King of Spain, or makes rightful King of Spain dictionary-worthy. bd2412 T 14:33, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The definition of any term is just a summary of how people use the term.
 * The definition provided by that often-invoked lemming WordNet and followed by others is clearly SoP. Furthermore, many uses of legal right that reflect a meaning of not accommodated by our definitions of legal and right could be accommodated by more and/or better definitions of the component terms. I suppose that most of the meanings of legal can be used with right: "mandated by law"; "permitted by law"; "conforming to law"; "in law, not in fact"; "in law, not in equity"; "by law, not morality"; "in form or fiction recognized by law"; ?"of lawyers". None of these seems so common as to exclude the others.
 * I suppose that this just shows that WordNet is not a lemming to be followed, even when some others follow it. DCDuring TALK 16:23, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree with BD2412. This is not separate usage, but semantically correct use of 'legal right' where the person using it is wrong on a factual not a linguistic level. It's like when I see a dog in the dark and it turns out to be a fox, do we therefore need a definition at dog that says " Fox". Renard Migrant (talk) 16:42, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
 * As you must have missed, I said above that I don't think we need to keep this term.
 * But the fact/language distinction that you argue from does not hold up to careful examination. What constitutes a 'fact' changes over time. The dominant school of taxonomic thought now considers taxonomic names to be expressions of hypotheses about descent. Some older names are therefore thought to be erroneous. They are nonetheless in use, though usually by neighboring fields, such as agriculture and horticulture. In addition, there are periods when a significant portion of the relevant taxonomic community may hold to different descent hypotheses and therefore different sets of names. There are numerous similar examples in all of the sciences. A classical, non-taxonomic example are the names morning star, evening star, and Venus. DCDuring TALK 18:18, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Deleted. No further comment for over a month with respect to an entry for which everyone seems to agree that deletion is in order. bd2412 T 20:46, 12 November 2014 (UTC)