Talk:Kangaroo court

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This article was nominated for deletion on 17 January 2012 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep.

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Bad example

Latest comment: 3 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The current image for this article is of the People's Court of Nazi Germany. This is not a good choice. Our current lead sentence, which I think is good, is as follows:

> Kangaroo court is an informal pejorative term for a court that ignores recognized standards of law or justice, carries little or no official standing in the territory within which it resides, and is typically convened ad hoc.

I'm counting one out of three, making it not a central example. It works rhetorically: I would be more likely to call the People's Court a "kangaroo court" in casual conversation, rather than a "star chamber", say, because it's more pejorative, and one does wish to be pejorative when referring to despicable things. But the purpose of an encyclopedia is not to insult things which deserve it, it's to explain concepts, and this illustration does not explain the concept of a kangaroo court well enough to keep it. We're better off with nothing unless we can find something better.

It's already been removed and restored once (I was involved in neither) so I'm going to stick with explaining why it shouldn't be here and leave it at that. I always think of the prisoner's court from Man of La Mancha, as a central example of the kangaroo court: one may be able to find a properly licensed image of same. ~2026-44769-47 (talk) 21:38, 5 October 2026 (UTC)Reply