Template:Did you know nominations/Stanley v. Georgia

Insufficiency in references/citations unresolved after 2 weeks

Stanley v. Georgia
Created by Drozycki16 (talk). Self nom at 23:07, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
 * ... that owning pornography was illegal in the US until 1969, when the Supreme Court ruled in Stanley v. Georgia that individuals cannot be prosecuted for private possession of obscenity?


 * Symbol possible vote.svg I'm glad someone expanded this one beyond stub status, given its importance, but it needs more work to get it up to WP:SCOTUS standards as well as make me comfortable with linking it from the Main Page:
 * First, there are long stretches without any footnotes whatsoever.
 * Second, the footnotes themselves can't just cite the case. Legal citations need to cite the volume, reporter and page (on first ref) or page (on subsequent refs to the same case), and year, just as they would in a law review article or court opinion. You can use ussc for this (and, of course, you also need on first cite of a SCOTUS case to cite the justice writing, i.e. "Marshall, J." or "Black, J., concurring".
 * Likewise, the non-legal footnotes need to at least cite the page number.
 * And these are not DYK dealbreakers, but improvements we ought to have (i.e., things I would do if I were writing the article, like all the other Supreme Court case articles I've researched and written)
 * One of those latter articles that I developed was United States v. Thirty-seven Photographs (oh, I just love in rem case names). That did not ban the importation of obscenity, it upheld the existing ban that Congress had imposed many years before (See, also, United States v. 12 200-ft. Reels of Film, which upheld that ban yet again after Miller v. California)
 * The infobox at least could use the case's prior history, with cites. The Georgia Supreme Court's decision (224 Ga. 259, 161 S.E.2d 309), and any appellate decision leading up to that, should be given there.
 * And if you add that, why not write the history of the case leading up to that? The Supreme Court certainly didn't have original jurisdiction here, nor in many other cases, yet too often we write our articles as if it did. What did the Georgia Supreme Court say in Stanley v. State? Stanley seems to have relied mainly on the Fourth Amendment claims that bothered Stewart enough in his concurrence.

More later, I have to go. Daniel Case (talk) 17:46, 19 December 2011 (UTC) OK, I'm back:
 * It's also worth looking for and discussing the briefs and (especially) oral argument transcript. What did the parties say? (The article tells us little about the state's argument that protecting private porn possession would lead to all sorts of bad things. Yet that was the other side of the case. It would be nice to know how much effort Georgia devoted to trying to persuade the Court of this). At oral, what sort of questions did the justices ask, and what did the attorneys say in response? Seeing how those arguments played out is very useful. And, we might want to know, who filed amici and what did they say?
 * Doing this means you don't have to discuss so much background during discussion of the Court's opini

on.
 * Justice Black filed a concurrence of his own, reiterating and referring to his other, longer statements in other cases that the state has no business regulating obscenity. That should at least be noted.
 * Don't be afraid to quote at some length from the justices. Nothing speaks for them as well as their own words. You don't have to reprint it verbatim, but this opinion has some oft-quoted passages that deserve to be in here:

"If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."

"... the State may no more prohibit mere possession of obscene matter on the ground that it may lead to antisocial conduct than it may prohibit possession of chemistry books on the ground that they may lead to the manufacture of homemade spirits."


 * We should have some idea how contemporaneous media reacted. This case affected every American. There would have been newspaper editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post, to say the least. Articles about the decision would have quoted people both praising and condemning it. We need some of that.
 * And it's a good idea to see if there's any significant legal critiques of it, in law reviews somewhere.

My personal standard for writing SCOTUS case articles is Ontario v. Quon, which is, granted, more recent and has more available but I nevertheless feel that's the sort of comprehensive account and discussion we should strive for with every Supreme Court case. Take a look. Daniel Case (talk) 18:46, 19 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Symbol delete vote.svg Several places are still dreadfully unreferenced, even though it's been two weeks. Crisco 1492 (talk) 00:00, 2 January 2012 (UTC)