451

June 20th, 2012

I love the fact that Tim Bray is so keen that his proposal for a new HTTP status code for cases where access to a resource is blocked for legal reasons incorporates a Latin example that is both grammatical and historically accurate:

One of the things in the proposal is that the 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons status is sup­posed to be ac­companied by an explanation of what the legal restrictions are, and what class of sites they apply to. The proposal has an ex­ample, and since obviously you don't want to use any real legal author­i­ties in this situation, I decided to pick on the Roman Empire:

This re­quest may not be serviced in the Roman Province of Judea due to Lex3515, the Legem Ne Subversionem Act of AUC755, which dis­al­lows access to re­sources hosted on servers deemed to be operated by the Judean Liberation Front.

[...]

But I made up the name of the Roman law by typing some­thing into Google Trans­late. So… does any­one read­ing this know what a plausible Latin name would be for such a law, and how it would be cited? Roman his­tory is full of law­suits, so I assume it must have been a fairly routine operation. Thanks in ad­vance.

Attention to detail1 being very much the mark of the Alpha Geek.

  1. And yes, he's already acknowledged that he muffed the Monty Python joke, and will be inserting a reference to the People's Front of Judea in a future revision. ↩

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