Talk:Blackstone's ratio

Some useful references

 * http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm
 * http://www.springerlink.com/content/p04416485r434222/
 * http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0147-7307(198706)11%3A2%3C101%3ADTRDAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V
 * http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0897-6546(199624)21%3A1%3C95%3ATDBBER%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A

I hope to be able to clean up this article and expand it a bit. --Filll 18:39, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Citation needed for Bismarck quote
Citation needed for Bismarck quote.

Relevance
Is the Simpsons' "popular culture" section really relevant to this page? I suggest deletion.
 * I removed it. Seemed incredibly pointless, even distracting, to have a single popular culture reference in this page. --broken_chaos (talk) 18:19, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Image Caption?
Is this image (with the superimposed caption) in Wikipedia's desired style? As an IP, I'm hesitant to delete anything, and ClueBot would probably revert it, but I'd like to put it out there that this may need done.72.224.172.14 (talk) 22:51, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

Viewpoints in Politics Bias
Am I wrong in reading some bias towards Klein in the section about the Affirmative consent law and comparisons to Cheney? (preceding unsigned comment by User:Doctordubin)


 * I removed that sentence. Arguably non-neutral point of view, arguably irrelevant to the subject of this article, but also the analogy between Cheney's logic and Klein's argument was not being made by a cited, reliable source and was therefore original research. Graue (talk) 07:19, 10 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I don't see why the entire case reference had to be removed. If the analogy to Cheney was problematic, then that alone could be removed, leaving the rest of the text intact. The reference to Ezra Klein's article is perfectly valid and relevant to the subject, as it was expressing support to a proposed law that could admittedly victimise innocent people by removing mens rea from the definition of a set of criminal behaviours and thus weakening the burden of proof. I don't see any possible interpretation of Klein's position that could not be relevant to the subject. Please elaborate as to why it was deemed "arguably irrelevant". Noxteryn (talk) 05:02, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

General improvements
I've been writing about connected issues in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and would feel this page is in pretty bad shape. I'm going to work on improving it from the bottom up, dealing first with the ratio's appearance in Blackstone's Commentaries, then with the pre-history, then, which seems logical to me since it is more directly relevant moving the Commentaries section above the pre-history section, then dealing with the introduction and finally with the page title.

On the page title, given that this idea has been known for centuries as "Blackstone's ratio", does anyone have a good reason for the odd formulation of "Blackstone's formulation"?

Willbown (talk) 11:18, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

OK. I've done all this now.

Willbown (talk) 18:14, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Bismarck Quote is fake
Prince Otto von Bismarck said, "It is better that ten innocent men suffer than one guilty man escape." is certainly a false "meme" quote. For a Prussian, Bismarck was anything but an authoritarian, he created the first welfare state and was almost the first to give jews citizenship – that he was an authoritarian personality is an unfounded opinion. 12 years ago a request was made in this thread for a citation, it has not appeared because there is none. I speak German and searched for it in German and in English. It simply doesn't exist. To place something in quotation marks without a source should be well below Wiki standards, even if its a real quote. This isn't.

Hroberth Dunbar (talk)

Is there not a better source for this "quote?"
Communists employed similar reasoning during the uprisings in Jiangxi, China in the 1930s: "Better to kill a hundred innocent people than let one truly guilty person go free,"[26] is sourced to a McArthur Justice blog just saying "In the 1930s, for example, Chinese communists reasoned, “Better to kill a hundred innocent people than let one truly guilty person go free.” "

Now I don't doubt the veracity of the sentiment, and while David Shapiro has written enough on law to be a source on law, I don't think he's a valid source for communist history. I think there is a saying similar to this in Mao's writings? Would that not be a better attribution? Or at least can we remove it from quotes because I can't seem to find anyone or any organization actually saying this quote?

67.135.218.10 (talk) 18:21, 31 August 2022 (UTC)