I'm trying to tidy up my code by using named_scopes in Rails 2.3.x but where I'm struggling with the has_many :through associations. I'm wondering if I'm putting the scopes in the wrong place... Here's some pseudo code below. The problem is that the :accepted named scope is replicated twice... I could of course call :accepted something different but these are the statuses on the table and it seems wrong to call them something different. Can anyone shed light on whether I'm doing the following correctly or not? I know Rails 3 is out but it's still in beta and it's a big project I'm doing so I can't use it in production yet. class Person < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :connections has_many :contacts, :through => :connections named_scope :accepted, :conditions => ["connections.status = ?", Connection::ACCEPTED] # the :accepted named_scope is duplicated named_scope :accepted, :conditions => ["memberships.status = ?", Membership::ACCEPTED] end class Group < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :memberships has_many :members, :through => :memberships end class Connection < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :person belongs_to :contact, :class_name => "Person", :foreign_key => "contact_id" end class Membership < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :person belongs_to :group end I'm trying to run something like person.contacts.accepted and group.members.accepted which are two different things. Shouldn't the named_scopes be in the Membership and Connection classes? One solution is to just call the two different named scope something different in the Person class or even to create separate associations (ie. has_many :accepted_members and has_many :accepted_contacts) but it seems hackish and in reality I have many more than just accepted (ie. banned members, ignored connections, pending, requested etc etc)