Talk:Regina v. Hicklin
Notes edit
It took me a long time to track down a copy of this case. Unlike American cases, there seems to be no public online directory of English cases. However, non-public databases like LexisNexis have copies of the case. Under the doctrine of Feist v. Rural, it is legal to take a public-domain work (in this case, the court's decision) from a copyrighted compilation (be it a law textbook, database, or article), although I do not know Wikisource's policy on this. The Commons policy on artwork reproductions states in quite clear language that a faithful reproduction of an uncopyrighted piece of artwork is uncopyrighted, despite the fact that the artwork may be part of a copyrighted compilation. The analogy for case-law compilations is clear.
Regarding style, I am not quite satisfied with putting the whole case on one page, as seems to be done in other cases in Category:British Case Law. The document is quite long, and should probably be split into a syllabus, an argument, and four opinions (whose text should be broken up into readable paragraphs). However, this would break with convention and require creating an amended template for English law cases. Is there a fixed convention for English cases (as there is for American cases) on Wikisource?