Talk:Principle of legality in French criminal law

Requested move 23 November 2022

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: not moved. As nom, I withdraw my nomination. I concede I was not well enough informed about the significance of the principle of legality in French law. Nevertheless, I think moves/splits may be necessary in the future. (non-admin closure) Sungodtemple (talk) 14:55, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Principle of legality in French criminal law → Principle of legality – Principle of legality currently redirects to Legality. If we have such a specific article applying only to French criminal law it should be appropriate to use a broader shell. Sungodtemple (talk) 02:50, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Oppose First of all, it's really bad form to start a page move discussion when an article is not yet 12 hours old, and I'm tempted to just remove the requested move header, but I'd rather you do it. Secondly, there is zero chance this will be renamed to Principle of legality, that is a broader concept, which if you would've waited a few more hours or days, might have become clearer. Finally, I have no idea what your last sentence about shells is supposed to mean. Mathglot (talk) 11:11, 23 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Oppose as article creator: This article is a cornerstone of an nascent initiative to improve Wikipedia's really confusing and often erroneous coverage of the Napoleonic legal system, which is fundamentally different from common law for exactly the reasons outlined in this article. Unlike common law legal systems, which rely on case law, civil (Napoleonic) systems hold that you cannot commit an offense which has not, prior to commission, been codified and published in clearly-written legislation prior to the act in question. For reasons of Napoleon, this type of legal system is actually more prevalent than the one to which most English speakers are accustomed. Although the legal systems of the countries in question, such as Brazil, have each evolved in their own fashion, they share common traits, such as judges who investigate for the prosecution (sorta), that currently require seas of redlinks to write up. See Operation Car Wash and its many offshoots for example, for which I got an Editor of the Week award, btw. : as mentioned elsewhere, I need to go deal with urgent offline matters, but I think that the map you added to one of the French law articles, I can't remember which, would be very instructive here. Could you post it here please? (found it, see below) Elinruby (talk) 23:05, 23 November 2022 (UTC) Meanwhile: possibly at some future time there should be an overarching article on legality in Napoleonic systems as well as one on legality as a concept, but note that this would largely consist of elaborating on the above explanation, which I personally am currently unable to improve, and would certainly definitely for sure at the current time be swamped in redlinks. (See the discussion at Talk:Natural person in French law.) Constructive input is of course welcome, but I urge a speedy close of this no doubt well-intentioned but completely ill-founded move proposal Elinruby (talk) 16:02, 23 November 2022 (UTC)


 * I have just noticed that legality exists and refers to a completely different concept in the completely different common law system. The term of art legalité that I discuss above should perhaps not be translated as "legality" and, at least for the nonce, should likely be left as a French vocabulary word. I would not oppose a move to "Legalité in French criminal law", which would resolve the problem the OP is trying to solve without implementing his solution, which is Quite Simply Wrong and would create a "Principle of legality" article that contradicts the "Legality" article to which "principle of legality" currently redirects. Elinruby (talk) 16:54, 23 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Oppose and speedy close nom, are you planning to write Principle of legality in British criminal law and Principle of legality in US criminal law etc.? In ictu oculi (talk) 17:53, 23 November 2022 (UTC)


 * I am not the nom, but I will answer that: currently I have no plans to write any such articles since, as we see, I currently have my hands full trying to explain to en.wikipedia that French criminal law differs from US criminal law and British criminal law. Légalité as the concept manifests in French law does not exist in these common law systems, with the possible caveat that it sprang from the same Age of Enlightenment that influenced the American and French revolutions. The effect of it (if any) on US law might make an interesting article, but let's start with recognizing that it exists in the first place in *French* law. The same goes for an article about how a book by an Italian marquis came to affect Brazilian criminal investigations; but that's a shiny object at this point. There is Simply. No. Question. that the topic is highly notable, as it is also pertinent to the foundations of human rights law, but hey, the article is still a baby. A better move to put it in context would be an article "Légalité in the Napoleonic legal system" that discusses its importance vs. the whims of kings or the obscurity of case law in common law judicial systems but even I (jk) cannot perform all feats in a day or two. has been compiling a list of redlinks, if anyone wishes to help, btw  Elinruby (talk) 20:00, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Well, more a "list of links" about French criminal law, most of which (not surprisingly) are red, and may help point the way to expanding en-wiki's coverage about this important general topic. Those who wish to help are invited to expand French criminal law with relevant links, and to turn red links there into blue ones. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:42, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Elinruby (talk) 20:19, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

To-do

 * References in Canada section imported from fr.wikipedia do not point to most recent version of the legislation Elinruby (talk) 06:49, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Probably should also update fr.wikipedia Elinruby (talk) 07:41, 24 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Switzerland references: website is massive and ill-suited to mobile. On a mobile, it says that the English version is "being prepared". See if this is also true on desktop. References currently point to French mobile version. Four other languages allegedly available.


 * Swiss law appears to allow retroactive illegality. Verify


 * Current references in the Parallel systems section from French wikipedia are primary. Need some that are secondary. Elinruby (talk)
 * Made a decent start on secondary references. More/better could and should be found, existing references' format could/should be polished. Stopping for now as this not the most important section, and we should first work on sections that are about the article's topic, vs other things that exist and look a little bit like it. This section might grow into a spin-off article.Elinruby (talk) 09:11, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Now that I look
I think it's not parlement (that's Canada) but also not parliament. Anyone have an opinion on this? If it's post-Revolution shouldn't it be Assemblée nationale? Answering this requires a deep dive I cannot do right now, deep in travel woes. You would think fr.wiki would be right about this. Elinruby (talk) 20:20, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Anyone object to me moving this to "Légalité in French criminal law"?
This is my current understanding of the thing to do, although I wonder if has any thoughts. The recent RfM was withdrawn once the OP understood that French law is not common law, although the OP had a point in saying that In English Principle of Legality is currently a redirect to Legality; but that page is about the use of the term in common law systems so that's wrong. However, the COMMON NAME should prevail, right? So let's use légalité. Also, I don't.usually do an RfM, particularly when I am correcting myself, but maybe we should here, since there has already been one? What to you think, ? Elinruby (talk) 20:14, 26 November 2022 (UTC)


 * I don't see the point of using légalité rather than "legality" in the article name. The concept in French criminal law seems reasonable to include among the varying meanings of "legality" that are discussed at legality. That article doesn't (currently, at least) claim that there's a single well-defined notion of legality in English, although the definitions are all related in some way to the notion of "consistent with the law" or "defined by a law". Legality could be reworked to more clearly define its usage in common law vs civil law.It would be good to see if a brief description of Principle of legality in French criminal law could be integrated into the body of legality and cross-linked, to see how it relates to other definitions, instead of being a see also link, though that would require some effort from someone with the time to do that (maybe a world-wide list of "legality" per jurisdiction? grouped by common law vs civil law vs mixed systems?). There are at least some cases like non-refoulement, where the French word has become the standard English word. But in this case, using légalité in this article title would sound to many people like an attempt to be fashionable (I'm not accusing of that :)).Anyway, I think that legality is the place to  clarify the various definitions of "legality". This article seems self-contained and well-named. Boud (talk) 21:38, 26 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Those are some good points. I will take a closer look at Legality. Anybody else I should be pinging? I'll add the OP on the RM. If it makes any difference to anyone's thinking, this article is about 40% of the French original, which like many fr.wikipedia articles, has too high a ratio of primary to secondary sources, seems very lucid and authoritative. Elinruby (talk) 01:49, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I would object to such a move, mostly because it's unnecessary, and because WP:AT supports the current title. If there are reliable, secondary sources that discuss the concept with an English term, then that is the term we should use. This scholar search shows that many reliable English sources *do* use the expression, "principle of legality", in English, and in connection with this principle of French law, which means that, per WP:AT, there shouldn't be any contest or question about wat the title should be.
 * While I find Boud's analysis good about general aspects of it, we shouldn't really be concentrating on other concepts in French law, or notions of civil vs. criminal law, and so on. The real question should be to align the title of the article with the policies set forth at WP:Article title, which governs the titles of all articles at Wikipedia. Regarding concepts that originate in a foreign language, WP:AT addresses this at WP:AT, and says, "On the English Wikipedia, article titles are written using the English language." (along with some "buts"). This is why we have "National Assembly (France)" (and not Assemblée nationale (France)) or French Third Republic (and not Troisième République), or the Dreyfus Affair (and not affaire Dreyfus), or Eiffel Tower (and not tour Eiffel). There are only a few cases I can think of where we don't use an English title:
 * when it's a proper name of a person
 * when English-language sources primarily use the French term, such as is the case for Laissez-faire;
 * when there are no English sources that talk about the concept at all, or so few, that there is no real consensus what to call it in English, *and* translating it into a neutral, descriptive title in English would be impossible, either because it would be so long to describe, or because the concept itself doesn't exist in English and it just doesn't lend itself to translation.
 * We ran into the second case at OCW for a few topics in Brazilian law, such as for concepts like condução coercitiva, or vantagem indevida, or foro privilegiado, which have no real equivalent in English jurisprudence, and if you try to translate them literally, it makes no sense at all, and/or gives the reader no concept of what it is about (see for example, Coercive driving). Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 06:39, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I remember Operation Car Wash ;) Meanwhile, I stand in awe of that glossary. I knew you made one, but wow. Wow and triple wow Elinruby (talk) 16:37, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Neutral: This is giving me a headache. Sungodtemple (talk) 15:20, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * We got this ;) I mainly pinged you to let you know that you weren't as wrong as I told you you were. If you know a way to bring this to the attention of an expert in European Union law, such as Category: EU law articles in need of expert attention (guessing because I am in mobile view and  don't have that tool on this device), that would be helpful. Please don't start a binding RfM though ;) My problem with the above, from editors I respect and know to be well aware of the common law/civil law distinction I made above, is that I am pretty sure I am not competent to do the sort of meta analysis  is talking about. IANAL at all let alone that sort of specialist. If not however, meanwhile, I just thought of ; he's an experienced NPP guy who works with languages and might know. The article isn't exactly about EU law, mind you, but if we know of such a person, they probably can help. Elinruby (talk) 16:10, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Elinruby (talk) 12:24, 27 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Note: we now have (new) article Principle of legality in criminal law, with redirect Principle of legality targeting it. Numerous countries have the principle of legality ("all democratic countries", according to a few sources) and so there's no need to rename the word in question to legalité in this one. Ideally, we'll end up with a suite of articles:
 * Principle of legality in Canadian criminal law
 * Principle of legality in German criminal law
 * Principle of legality in Swiss criminal law
 * Principle of legality in U.S. criminal law
 * and so on, corresponding to the subsections already present (originally included in this article; thanks for those), and maybe many more some day. There's no reason to translate the word legality into all the different languages, when they all derive from Beccaria and nulla poena sine lege and are national variations on the same principle. Bottom line: we should follow what English sources say, and nobody uses "Principle of legalité" when referring to France, and I suspect the same is true of most other contries/languages. Mathglot (talk) 08:08, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Move international section to parent
Now that we have Principle of legality in criminal law, it would make sense to move all or almost all of section to the other article, possibly leaving a brief summary here, or just linking to the parent. Mathglot (talk) 07:10, 23 May 2024 (UTC)