Talk:retroactive law

RFD discussion: October 2022–June 2023
SOP. PUC – 13:44, 1 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep per WT:LEMMING. Black's Law Dictionary has an entry (in both the 1910 and 1991 editions that I have on hand), as does Merriam-Webster's Law Dictionary. bd2412 T 06:44, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete as SoP. Not sure the reference to Black's Law Dictionary is that helpful; as it is a specialist dictionary, it contains entries that we would regard as SoP for the purpose of explaining the legal principles. A parallel example would be referring to a dictionary of chemicals, which is sure to contain many SoP names of chemicals as entries. — Sgconlaw (talk) 18:28, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Why should we be less helpful to readers than the most widely used specialist dictionaries? It's not as though this is only found in an obscure dictionary of an obscure field. bd2412 T 23:44, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I second the comment of BD2412. If Wiktionary doesn't include specialist words, then what's it for? Does descriptivist ideology extend only to documentation of racist neologisms? --Geographyinitiative (talk) 00:05, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I think that’s a specious argument. If the test for inclusion is “what a reader might find helpful”, we might as well have no other criteria for inclusion. The meaning of “retroactive law” is simply “a law which is retroactive”, and if a reader does not understand what retroactive means they can just look up that word. A law dictionary is intended to contain terms, whether SoP or not, that judges, lawyers, and law students might come across in the course of their work, so one may expect to find entries that do not meet the CFI here in such a dictionary. For example, in the 1st edition of Black’s there are entries like Institutes of Lord Coke (well-known set of law books) and insurance agent.
 * Also, the current definition is incorrect. Civil (non-criminal) laws can also be retroactive. — Sgconlaw (talk) 04:38, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
 * If the definition is incorrect, then fix it. My point is that "law" is not some obscure field like scorpiology, and Black's Law is not an obscure dictionary. bd2412 T 19:32, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
 * And my point is that a more accurate definition is "a law that is retroactive in nature", which is entirely SoP. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:38, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
 * The definition we have is very poor, I agree. Retroactive laws can do lots of other things besides making acts illegal, such as legalisation, the application of civil liability, taxation etc. It's a reasonably common term, but I don't see how it isn't SOP. Theknightwho (talk) 22:39, 19 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I thought retroactive law was a more natural entry to look up, but the page view data shows users are looking predominantly for retroactive.|retroactive. This is very different from bulleted vs. bulleted list, where the list wins|bulleted_list. On the other hand, the term is in (I find their definition much clearer than ours). But WT:LEMMING requires at least two lemmings, and it requires "general monolingual dictionaries". The rationale might be that "specialist" dictionaries may tend to include encyclopedic heads? LEMMING did use to speak of specialized dictionaries, so the matter is not settled in any way. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:34, 14 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete, SOP, as also indicated by its terrible wrong definition, showing that someone just did not know what he talks about. Law dictionaries have all kinds of magic words that are inclusionworthy there for their being often recommendable to be used in a specific context, which is the essence of collocations. Fay Freak (talk) 20:49, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete, SOP. - -sche (discuss) 08:56, 4 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Abstain: "law" is not even at the top of collocations at . "retroactive legislation" would sooner be the term. This is very much unlike, where bulleted list leads the pack. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:11, 4 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep per WT:LEMMING. Binarystep (talk) 10:26, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Can be deleted per consensus for deletion (4:2). --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:43, 4 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Delete as SOP as noted. "Chocolate cake" may appear in a cookbook but is just SOP here. Facts707 (talk) 09:34, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

RFD-deleted. PUC – 12:01, 3 June 2023 (UTC)