Wikipedia:WikiProject Australian law/Policy

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This page is for the formulation and discussion of policy (such as naming conventions) for the WikiProject Australian law.

[edit] Case names

Should case names include citations (eg. a Commonwealth Law Reports reference)? Or should citations simply be listed within the article?

Citations inside the article. I suggest following the American example, with the added dot (i.e. Roe v. Wade) in the title, and then listing the citations in the first paragraph of the lead section. No need to reinvent the wheel. Ambi 07:40, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

agree. same name cases can be disambiged. Xtra 05:15, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Here are a few conventions that I've adapted from the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (pdf, 759kb) that might be useful.

• There's no need to have '& Anor' or 'Ors' in your titles, save the full name for inside the article
• Within the article, the case name should be italicised
• When a party is the Commonwealth, say 'Commonwealth'; when a party is a state or territory, say (eg) 'Victoria' rather than 'State of Victoria'
• In criminal stuff, use 'R' rather than 'The King' or 'The Queen' (except where the crown is the respondent)
• The 'v' between parties shouldn't have a full stop after it, but the Americans have already started using them, so for consistency we probably should too.

Of course, just because I use the AGLC doesn't mean everyone has to. Questions or comments anyone? --bainer 23:09, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

i like the aglc. a quality melbourne uni publication (being a biased melbourne uni student). following it is a good idea, but it is not the only naming convention available. (personally i do not like dots after "v"). Xtra 03:35, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Final proposal

There doesn't seem to be too much of a problem here, the only issue would seem to be whether to have dots in the case names like the Americans have (ie. Dietrich v. The Queen as opposed to Dietrich v The Queen). Most Australian sources don't have the dot, but should we have it for consistency? For the sake of consistency, I say we should use dots, even though they look a little silly. If there's no opposition, I think I'll make this the policy. --bainer 08:52, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have made my comments above. I think dots look ugly. If you just want to do it to have consistency with the Americans, is this the common practice for all areas in wikipedia where naming conventions vary between countries? Xtra 09:03, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm really not fussed either way. Ambi 12:27, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Xtra. The dots don't look good. Since they are Australian cases, we should stick with the convention in Australia. --Yu Ninjie 07:50, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I suppose the other argument is that anyone looking up Australian law will probably be using Australian conventions, and they'll probably come through a page like Category:Australian law or something like that anyway. It seems that people don't like dots then, so no dots will there be. I think that will make things much simpler anyway. --bainer 13:13, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hi, I know you guys concluded the issue a while ago, but I just joined this... I was editing some law articles just then, and for the main law articles, such as contract, Australian cases are interspersed with cases from other countries. For consistency, shouldn't we use the dot? Enochlau 11:33, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes I noticed that too. It seems like those cases were mentioned from references in US textbooks, since all the citations follow American rules ('et al' instead of '& Ors', for example). As articles on Australian cases have been added, some of these citations have changed. It would probably be worth changing the rest. --bainer (talk) 22:09, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)