Talk:Patrick Borchers

This article was nominated for deletion on 19 November 2013 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep.

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Patrick J. Borchers (talk · contribs) / Patrick Borchers This user has contributed to the article.

Synthesis and significance

A lengthy insertion [1] apparently attempts to establish Borchers's notability by citing a number of higher-court cases on which Borchers purportedly had a significant influence. I've checked several of these, and they don't seem to support the assertions made in the article.

The article asserts that in Silver v. IMAX Corp., the Ontario Court of Appeals certified a class action "based substantially on Borchers's expert opinion". Searching the text for "borchers" turns up nothing.

The article states that in Tolliver v. Naor, "a U.S. federal court adopted his opinion..." Searching the text for "borchers" turns up one occurrence: "Ryder [the defendant] provided the declaration of Dean Patrick Borchers that..."

The article states that in Townsend v. Sears, Roebuck and Co., "the Illinois Supreme Court adopted the approach to choice-of-law decisions that Borchers advocated in an article he published in the Maryland Law Review". Searching the text for "borchers" produces two occurrences, both in the same paragraph. The phrasing of the article seems a bit disingenuous: "Thousands of surgeons remove spleens in the manner described by Dr. Smith" implies that Smith invented or popularized the spleen-removal technique, whereas Smith may have done nothing more than written a description of a well-known technique.

The insertion contains a number of statements that're supported by examples rather than citations to sources that make the statements directly. This is contrary to WP:SYNTH, which is an aspect of WP's core "No original research" policy. I've hung citation-needed tags on several of these. Ammodramus (talk) 01:27, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Several citation-needed tags have been replaced with citations to Silver v. IMAX Corp. However, the cited passages do not appear to support the statements in the article. For example, the article asserts "Courts have recognized him [Borchers] as an expert in the conflict of laws", and cites paragraphs 425 and 433. These paragraphs read, in their entirety:

[425] With respect to the Delhi Post investigation, the Board members received a report from Mr. Copland as chair of the audit committee that did not contain details as to the specific accounting issue. The report concluded that there was no wrongdoing, and went on to affirm that “the Company’s internal controls and reporting structure appear well-designed to discover these types of accounting fraud should they have occurred”.

...

[433] Similarly, the expert reliance defence would not appear to apply to the press releases which did not “include, summarize or quote from” an opinion of PwC.

Neither of these appears to support the article's rather strong statement, although the word "expert" is used in 433. Note, too, that the article uses the plural "courts", implying, at least, that many courts have done so. To support a statement like this, we need a secondary source that can actually be quoted or paraphrased as the statement. It appears that the statement "Courts have..." is the editor's own opinion, which he/she is then supporting through citations of several specific documents. This is WP:OR, which is verboten: see in particular the paragraph headed "Policy" at WP:PRIMARY.

I've removed these references and restored the citation-needed tags. I'll ask the editor who inserted the citations to (1) read Wikipedia's "No original research" policy and (2) respond at this page before re-inserting these citations—Wikipedia operates on consensus, and it's hard to reach that without discussion. Ammodramus (talk) 13:58, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The entire academic section is over the top peacockery. Listing every court case in which he may have been cited is unencyclopedic; such a thing is not done in any other WP academic bio. 71.139.152.180 (talk) 14:48, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Lying by omission

The article states "For 2009, the Institute was ranked the 12th best dispute resolution program (three-way tie) by U.S. News & World Report." While that is true, it is incredibly misleading. If you follow the second source ([2]), you can see that there were only 19 schools included in the ranking, and that only two of those were ranked lower than Creighton. Leaving the statement as is would lead most readers to the impression that all law schools in the U.S. were included in the ranking, when clearly they were not. Therefore, I have added the phrase "of the 19 U.S. programs ranked" in order to make the statement and the article accurate, fair, and unbiased (WP:NPOV, WP:IMPARTIAL). 71.139.152.181 (talk) 17:44, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Good eye. When I read the article with the 12th-best statement, I got exactly that impression: that it ranked 12th among all the law schools in the nation. Ammodramus (talk) 18:55, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sanitary Improvement District No. 498

I'm removing the passage regarding Borchers's sitting on the board of Douglas County Sanitary Improvement District #498. This appears to be a very small governmental entity, especially when one considers it as a part of the Omaha metro: per the Douglas County Election Commission, a total of 60 votes was cast in the 2011 election; since three trustees were elected on this ballot, it's not clear whether 60 people cast one vote each, or 20 people cast three votes each. The SID is geographically small, as well: a map from the City of Omaha Planning Department shows it as a small strip east of 192nd between Pacific and Center (a string search for "498" will find it on the map; it's labelled "Pacific Pointe 498"). I'd estimate its area as about 40 acres. If information regarding Borchers's post on the SID board is restored to the article, then some indication of the district's size should be included. Ammodramus (talk) 02:39, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not a politician

I removed the few remaining references to his involvement in politics, which have been de minimis. They were poorly sourced, in violation of WP:BLP, and trivial. Bearian (talk) 13:32, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Lying by omission redux

A recent edit inserted the statement, "In 2014, U.S. News and World Report ranked the Werner Institute the 14th best such program." The statement was sourced to a Creighton Law page boasting of this fact. The Creighton page didn't give the total number of programs ranked, and I wasn't able to find the 2014 list; but in 2015, only 17 schools were ranked, and I suspect that the number was similar in 2014. Including Creighton's 14th-place ranking without mentioning the small total number of schools ranked is misleading: the sort of thing one can expect of a school's PR office, but not acceptable in a reputable encyclopedia. — Ammodramus (talk) 03:30, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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