Proposal: Law
This question is a copy of this question.
Even in the proposal phase, Law seems to be attracting questions of the form "Is it legal for me to...", "How can I..." and so forth.
There are two different problems with questions seeking legal advice. First and most importantly, they pose the risk that either answerers or Stack Exchange or both will end up engaged in the unauthorized practice of law, with resulting liability issues. As comments to this post seem to indicate, at least some users don't know about or don't understand the law of unauthorized practice of law, and will (understandably!) object that legal advice is very helpful and exactly what they're looking for. We will need to address this tactfully.
Second, these personal, "consumer" questions pose community problems similar to those on Stack Overflow, where end-users or consumers sometimes ask questions inapplicable to a professional/hobbyist forum. This is a signal-to-noise-ratio problem more than a UPL problem: we may risk accumulating numerous low-quality questions that are unhelpful and uninteresting for the professional/enthusiast audience we (should be? are?) targeting.
As a first stab at the issue, I suggest an early policy requiring questions to be (1) phrased in the third person, and (2) susceptible to an answer of general applicability. These guidelines, while not encapsulating the underlying issue, could be good diagnostics both for posters and moderators.
Does this proposal make sense?
