"West and Osprey" Topic

It is an old joke among lawyers that West Publishing is the highest law making bodyin the US. For those not in the know, West publishes most of the case reporters in the country, at both state and federal levels (for those REALLY not in the know, a case reporter is what a lawyer uses to look up the decisions of various courts, to determine what the law is). West also runs Westlaw, which is one of the two biggest online legal reporting services.

Anyway, sometimes (understandably) West makes mistakes, even in a few cases, going so far as to completely reverse the holding (note that this is not common, by and large, the company does an excellent job of editing), but when this does happen, the erroneous holding effectively becomes the law unless somebody catches it, and this usually has to have been a judge or staff attorney involved in the actual writing of the opinion.

Now, to take this subject from the serious to the utterly trivial, I wonder if Osprey has the same problem. f Osprey says that the Gran Muckety Mook's Grenadier Guard Jannisary Streltsi Chasseurs wore green nylon stockings and pink mohawk haircuts, and stuffed daisies into the barrels of their rifles, is there anybody who seriously questions it, or does independent research to see if maybe they got it wrong?

Just curious.

Also, on a more serious note, I wonder if the medical field has the same problem as the legal field? Who publishes the various medical texts, and how do they check them? After all, in the law, the harm of an erroneous ruling can normally be undone, but, in medicine, get the decimal point in the wrong place on a drug dosage (for example) and you might have serious problems.

End of ramble,

Vince

is there anybody who seriously questions it,

Quite a few. If I thought of my wargame figure's uniforms as being important in the same way as I think of the title to my house, I'd do more reseach.

For a game, they're just fine.

There are some wargamers who make it their life's mission to discover mistakes in Osprey books. You know some of these people. I've spotted a couple of errors myself, and ripped one book to shreds in a public review (Osprey Comanche Warrior, boo hiss).

However, I must own that once a blatant mistake has been immortalized in an Osprey plate, it never goes away. Twenty years later, gamers still paint figures from the pretty, spurious picture.

>Anyway, sometimes (understandably) West makes mistakes, even in a few cases, going so far as to completely reverse the holding

I've seen this happen in headnotes, but do you mean that West had actually altered the text of the decision? That would be crazy all right… talk about the ultimate M. Night Shamalamalamalan twist ending… "wow, right up until the end of that 400-page decision I thought Learned Hand was going one way – then at the end he goes the exact opposite way!"

w.

No, I mean the headnotes. However, only about 50% of lawyers seem to read any further than that anyway.

And only about 10% of judges…

The biggest problem that can happen with Ospreys is that the plates become the source ofr figure designers. These can be fine, but sometimes the notes make clear that the plates do not depict the typical warrior of the period but something unusual. The Scythians book has loads of plates based on one source which the text says is unusual for showing bareheaded and/or barechested warriors. I bought a bunch of figs from a manufacturer sight unseen and they were all based on these atypical types.

zippyfusenet,

off-topic.

Where can I find your review of Osprey's Comanche book? I have it and was going to base some gaming off the contents in 2008.

religon, I posted it to a Yahoo group. Send me your email and I'll try to dig up a copy for you. I'm zippy-at-fuse-dot-net. But you don't really need my review, just read the text yourself (the plates are mostly okay). The Adventures of Spotted Pony. Oh. My. Ghawd. If someone out there hasn't bought a copy yet, don't.

For a good read on Comanches, I recommend T. R. Fehrenbach:

link