And yet, DSeid has been carrying on a very interesting series of threads on COVID-19 epidemiology, sometimes expressing his opinions, sometimes asking other posters their views. I guess that’s off-side too?
I am suitably chastised. :smack:
Not remotely. The question asked is not one that comes up every day, and is one where the laws may differ between jurisdictions.
This is completely off-base. If an attorney comes on the board and says something like, “Hey, I’m a licensed attorney in New York, and I was wondering, does anyone know whether the first amendment applies to people from New York?” then yeah, mock them. But when people ask questions about the peculiar edges of their field, not only is that not a bad thing, it’s a great thing. Experts in a field often know what the most interesting questions are.
I started a thread years ago about teaching game theory to third-graders. Nobody jumped on my ass about how could a teacher ask a question like that here. An attorney asking questions about laws around corpseportation is going to ask the question better than I could.
Now, the situation would be entirely different if UV wrote, “Hey, I’ve got a couple of guys in my office who are asking me whether they can drive their dead gramps down to Florida in their pickup truck. Does anyone know? I want to give them an answer.” In that case it’d be less-than-ideal. But that’s not what happened here.
I am currently the only active moderator in IMHO, and even though we are under quarantine, I am still working (able to work from home) which limits my availability for moderation. In general I can respond to things while working, as long as I can take care of them quickly. Moderators are suffering timeouts and server errors just like everyone else, so while taking a couple of minutes to address something is often no biggie, waiting 5 minutes just to be able to read each post may take more time than I have available at that moment.
I hope that you can forgive us during this time if we are slow to respond to some post reports or if some reports end up getting lost in the shuffle.
In any event, questioning someone’s professional abilities as was done in that thread basically amounts to a personal attack, which is strictly forbidden in any forum here except the Pit.
As has already been said here, there may be numerous reasons why a professional lawyer might want to ask a question about law. There is nothing wrong with asking the question. We do require that questions regarding legal issues be placed in IMHO, just to emphasize that any answers received are just the opinions of some online folks and should not be taken as the equivalent of professional legal advice.
Yeah, experts in a field should ask questions - to other experts in their field. Not to a bunch of anonymous message board posters.
(as an aside, I really like “corpseportation”)
Exactly how many experts in the field of pro se interstate corpseportation during a national pandemic do you think there are?
You’re entitled to your opinion, but there’s no rule against them asking questions here. Denigrating them for it can earn you a warning in any forum except the Pit.
You have to admit that there are very few message boards where something like “pro se interstate corpseportation” would even be posted. 
Thanks, engineer_comp_geek. Sorry if I seemed demanding; I thought I reported it a few days ago, but now that I look my post in the thread, it was just last night! Blame the time-dilation effects of quarantine. I’ve been finding myself asking “what day is it?” a lot more than usual these days.
One of the things that’s awesome about this place is that there are experts in all kinds of fields here, including arcane legal stuff. How many lawyers should UV have checked with for a question he was just curious about? If he asked his five closest lawyer friends and they didn’t know, should he be allowed to ask a more general message board that happens to have tons of lawyers?
Looking through the thread in question, I see I posted in it three times. One post was information about the topic, one post was disagreeing with something another poster said, and one post was a joke.
Add in responses to game threads, and I feel this encapsulates my contributions to this message board.
Of course he should be allowed to.
A good point.
Come to think of it, we might even question whether the states have any authority at all to have their own laws regulating interstate corpseportation. Wouldn’t Congress have the sole authority under the Commerce Clause? IIUC, the Supreme Court has made several rulings holding that even pro se activities fall within the authority of the Commerce Clause.
Completely agree. This is a long-standing principle on the board, it’s in the rules (#16), and has been explicitly stated multiple times.
If it were Canada, I could have fielded that over thirty-five years ago, and have added burial at sea on the Great Lakes. Le sigh . . . wrong place and wrong time to be of use to society. 
Why?
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You didn’t hear about Frank?
Such a thread might be interesting if the doctor was taking suggestions and then breaking down why the suggestion would or would not work. Sort of like a public service Q/A, “ask the doctor what he thinks about your ideas to fight COVID-19” thread. Then other doctors could jump in and share their opinions, and we lay people get interesting and informative exposure to doctor-think.
~Max
Yes actually. That would be an interesting thread.