Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Reasonableness


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was merge‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__ to Reasonability. Star  Mississippi  13:16, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Reasonableness

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

This seems very vague, and covers too many different contexts. I can see a merge request with Reasonability on the page, but am not 100% sure if this is the best course of action. Would appreciate further input. GnocchiFan (talk) 13:15, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete per WP:NOTDICT, and the reasonability article along with it. If anyone can find secondary sources that discuss the concept of reasonableness in the context of other legal constructs then I could see the point of the article, but not in its current form. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 14:09, 28 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Comment, I do see a few legitimate sources in the article, maybe it could be renamed Reasonableness (legal norm). Alaexis¿question? 14:15, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Philosophy, Law,  and Politics.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 14:22, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Merge, as creator of the former. The concepts of reasonableness / reasonability are core to modern political theory and jurisprudence, and also have distinct uses in criminal, administrative, contract and constitutional law. As for "vagueness" and WP:NOTDICT - see WP:BROAD, and compare with articles like Justice, Rationality and Morality, and with Fairness - which is tagged for article creation, rather than deletion. François Robere (talk) 14:29, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Rename + merge Agree that Reasonability should be merged with. The concept appears everywhere in the law and across legal systems, maybe can give a proper scope with something like The concept/principle of reasonableness in law (avoid parentheses as it is not really disambiguation as such?).Selfstudier (talk) 14:47, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * How do you propose we deal with the concept of reasonableness in political science, which underlies some of its legal uses? François Robere (talk) 15:43, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't personally, except to the extent that an allusion to it might fit somewhere in an article dealing with the purely legal aspects. Unlike the principal topic where the concept is bounded in practice, I doubt there is much to say there that is similarly constrained eg discussing what does reasonableness even mean? Selfstudier (talk) 16:26, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Alexy (in Reasonableness and Law, 2009) starts with the statement that "in order to be able to say what the reasonableness of law is, one has to know what “reasonableness” in general means" (curiously, he provides no clear answer). He then proceeds to discuss the meanings of "reasonableness" in political science, then in jurisprudence. I wouldn't say one is more ambiguous or exact ("constrained") than the other, and they certainly overlap in the definitional and normative parts; I think we should cover these two as theoretical background, otherwise we'd be left with a few gaping holes around the question of "what exactly is 'reasonableness' and where did it come from". Incidentally, Rawls is mentioned in that book roughly 287 times, and it's not the only source that ties the two subjects (just from a cursory look, we also have Hevia (2013), Zipursky (2015), and Mangini (2018)), so there's obviously some discussion to be had there. François Robere (talk) 18:14, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * curiously, he provides no clear answer Right, because in general it is a philosophical question. I still think it is better to have a page primarily on the legal aspects and without disambiguation. Should someone want to try and make a page out of the (many) other aspects of reasonableness ("How Can I Tell If My Algorithm Was Reasonable" below, for instance) that's doable too but then I don't think there is a concept/principle/standard that is as easy to get one's hands around as it is for the law, which is already tricky enough. Selfstudier (talk) 11:27, 29 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Rename + merge per Selfstudier. Reasonable is a very very common concept in law and can have quite specific legal definitions dependent upon case law. Tal pedia 15:06, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Rename and merge per above. The definition of reasonability is quite complex in a legal context and involves a number of legal concepts. Some articles that touch upon the notion of reasonableness include Man on the Clapham omnibus, A moron in a hurry, Person having ordinary skill in the art, Prudent man rule, Objective standard (law), Reasonable person, Duty of care. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 15:14, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 *  Keep Merge to Reasonability: I think there may be a good reason to keep this page around given the 2023 Israeli judicial reform centering on this legal concept. Adding a section on the concept of Reasonableness in Israeli would resolve the DICTDEF issue, make the article more encyclopedic, and distinguish it from the redirect nominations presented. Also, for full disclosure, I am a lawyer so that may be affecting my vote. TulsaPoliticsFan (talk) 16:00, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Just a particular case, probably comes from British law in the first instance, there are a few things in Israeli legal system coming from there; "unreasonableness" is just propspeak, the concept (or standard) is still reasonableness.Selfstudier (talk) 16:32, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * That's fair and I'll change my vote. TulsaPoliticsFan (talk) 17:37, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep/Merge with Reasonability. Agree that we don't need both pages, but reasonability as a legal concept is incredibly ubiquitous and important. There are tons of secondary sources discussing this concept in relation to law - below are just a few from academic journals in the last decade:
 * Kevin P. Tobia, How People Judge What Is Reasonable, 70 Ala. L. Rev. 293 (2018)
 * Alan Calnan, The Nature of Reasonableness, 105 Cornell L. Rev. Online 81 (2020)
 * Brian Sheppard, The Reasonableness Machine, 62 B.C. L. Rev. 2259 (2021)
 * Karni A. Chagal-Feferkorn, How Can I Tell If My Algorithm Was Reasonable?, 27 Mich. Tech. L. Rev. 213 (2021)
 * Benjamin C. Zipursky, Reasonableness in and Out of Negligence Law, 163 U. Pa. L. Rev. 2131 (2015)
 * Legal search engines (WestLaw, LexisNexis) return tens of thousands of results just among secondary sources (direct links are difficult because West charges an arm and a leg and sometimes the articles are otherwise paywalled). I don't think the name matters much, (Reasonableness, Reasonability, Reasonable (legal norm/concept/maxim), etc.) but the substance of the current Reasonableness page should be kept in one place or another. Kalethan (talk) 16:37, 28 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Keep and split and disambiguate. The legal concept satisfies GNG easily and by an exceptionally wide margin. The article is not a mere definition, and therefore does not violate WP:NOT. "Reasonableness" is the WP:COMMONNAME of the legal concept. Reasonability should be merged into the article on the legal concept. The political concept should be WP:SPLIT to a separate article. Some of the sources in the article are not the best available or the best starting point for the legal concept. The best place to look for the legal concept is periodical articles about law (rather than politics or philosophy): . That confirms that there are a large number of entire periodical articles about the legal concept, including, amongst many others,        . The coverage in those articles satisfies GNG and goes far beyond a definition. That establishes that GNG is satisfied and the article does not violate NOT. For the avoidance of doubt, reasonableness is a single concept. The fact that is used in other (compound) concepts does not change that. The fact that it is possible to speak of a "reasonable time" does not mean that either Time or Reasonableness is "just a word". The fact that it is possible to speak of a "reasonable person" does not mean that either Person or Reasonableness is "just a word". And so on. This AfD nomination is like saying that we should get rid of the article Time because it possible to speak of proper time, daylight saving time, unix time, reasonable time, planck time and a multitude of other times. James500 (talk) 20:20, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * For the avoidance of doubt, WP:HEYMANN says we can split this article right now. If one article in one in one interdisciplinary philosophy book "ties" the legal and political concepts (and I am not sure that it does), that does not prove anyone else accepts that view. It is not obvious to me that "reasonableness in general" is the same thing as "reasonableness in law and politics". What about reasonableness in morality or argumentation theory   or something like this  for example? The Bongiovanni book is part of a series on "law and philosophy", which would seem to indicate that it is about philosophy of law in particular, and not primarily about law and/or politics generally. I think we should probably have articles on Reasonableness generally, Reasonableness (law), Reasonableness (politics), Reasonableness (philosophy of law), Reasonableness (morality) and Reasonableness (argumentation) etc. It is not obvious to me that we should have an article whose scope is effectively Reasonableness (law and politics), using a single philosophy book as a starting point. James500 (talk) 20:50, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * When I changed Reasonableness from a redirect to a stub (and later a short article) I took note of two things: first, that a merge with Reasonability would probably be due at some point; and second, that the term is difficult to define, and appears in multiple contexts that are difficult to untangle. This is not as if to say that untangling them is impossible, but we have to careful not to severe the connections between subjects: the legal norms are buttressed by legal theory, which is built, in part, on a political philosophy. So I'm okay with splitting the current article to Reasonableness (general / disambig), Reasonableness (law) (specific norms, doctrines and standards) and Reasonableness (political and legal theory) (Rawls, Scanlon, Barry, and others), but we have to make the connections between subjects explicit through "background" or "theory" sections. François Robere (talk) 10:35, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Laws are not necessarily "buttressed by legal theory". Some time ago, Atiyah said that English law had a general aversion to theory; and Lord Lloyd of Hamstead said that jurisprudence was a dirty word among English lawyers. James500 (talk) 05:32, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, and Aharon Barak said "In my eyes, the world is filled with law. Every human behavior is subject to a legal norm..... Wherever there are living human beings, law is there. There are no areas in life which are outside of law." So there are scholarly differences of opinion on the ubiquity of legal theory. Good things to go into an article somewhere (and that are currently not in Reasonableness or Reasonability). TulsaPoliticsFan (talk) 13:44, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for reminding me: "Every norm is part of the fabric of a system. [And] every legal system has rules and principles side by side... The principles fill the normative 'universe'. They are the "soul" (voluntas) that surrounds the body (verba). All legal norms are created on the backdrop of these principles. It is only natural that these principles be used to understand the legal norms" (Barak, 2001). François Robere (talk) 18:14, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.