Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases/Archive 7

Ballin
Could someone please review Article Incubator/United States v. Ballin? &mdash; RHaworth 03:15, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Use of Justia.com
I appreciate everyone who is trying to fill the fix the flood of redlinks in all of the List of Supreme Court cases, volume X articles. I've noticed, however, that a number of them are directly copied and pasted from Justia.com. Is this okay to do? Verkhovensky (talk) 06:15, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Could you provide some diffs so we can see exactly what you're talking about? postdlf (talk) 13:50, 27 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Not totally sure if this is what Verkhovensky was referring to, but I've seen a couple of instances recently where someone had added Justia.com links in place of valid wikilinks to existing pages. (See, e.g., this edit, which includes some changes of this sort.)  This seems completely inappropriate (and I reverted the edit which I just gave as an example).  Richwales (talk) 17:10, 27 February 2010 (UTC)


 * What I was referring to were the articles about the cases in List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 113. Many of the case articles are copied and pasted from the Justia.com case summaries.  A few examples are:


 * Pullman Palace Car Co. v. Speck
 * Findlay v. McAllister
 * Central Railroad & Banking Co. of Ga. v. Pettus
 * Northern Liberty Market Co. v. Kelly
 * Tucker v. Masser
 * Anderson County Comm'rs v. Beal
 * Avegno v. Schmidt
 * These are just a few of the more egregious examples, but almost every single article in the volume in cribbed directly from Justia.com. Verkhovensky (talk) 18:03, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Just looking at the first few, the text seems just to be taken from portions of the Court's original opinion. Which is an issue of poor article writing, but nothing more. Those that have no content beyond opinion text could justifiably be speedy deleted. And if you can identify any that have original content taken from Justia (not just copies of the public domain SCOTUS opinions), however, those would likely be copyvios.

Also, there's no reason to favor Justia as a source of Court opinions over other websites. We have a template for giving multiple sources at Template:caselaw source, so any instance in which you find only Justia as a link should be replaced with that template and sources from Findlaw, enfacto, etc. (see it in use at Texas v. Johnson, for example). postdlf (talk) 02:32, 28 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I think Postdlf makes excellent points. I agree that a lot of the text is cribbed from the court opinions themselves, but it appears to me (and I could be mistaken) that a lot of the text is also taken from the Justia.com summary of the case, and not the actual text of the opinion.  Verkhovensky (talk) 02:38, 28 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Is it justia's summary, or is it the Court's official summary (called a "syllabus" and written by the Clerk's Office)? The articles that I've written have certainly leaned heavily on the syllabi, particularly for their summaries of the case history and factual record.  121a0012 (talk) 04:40, 28 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I suppose it's possible that the summaries are actually the syllabi, though a lot of them seem a bit too long for that. But then again that could just mean that Justia summaries are actually combinations of the written opinions and syllabi.  I suppose this might require some more thorough investigation.  Verkhovensky (talk) 04:58, 28 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Following up on 121a0012's sage suggestion I looked at the syllabi of the cases in question. It does indeed appear that Justia uses a combination of the syllabi and excerpts from the written opinions for their summaries.  It looks like the mystery has been solved.  Thanks to all for your help!  Verkhovensky (talk) 05:17, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Supreme Court web site change
Given the announcement that the Supreme Court is changing it web site, I recently began mass-editing URLs from supremecourtus.gov to supremecourt.gov. Well, it sounds like the change might be more complicated than I originally thought. postdlf found some links that have been moved, but it sounds like that might have happened before the new web site went online. But as the result of changing the URLs, some links that redirected to the new web site ended up getting a 404. postdlf is working on dealing with those issues in the "lists by term and justice", but there are many pages that does not cover.

Based on the press release, it sounds like the supremecourtus.gov domain will be removed as of July 1, 2010, which sounds strange to me, since I would expect that they would simply point it to the new servers. But nonetheless, there are still a large number of references to supremecourtus.gov on Wikipedia, which may break on July 1. Converting to the new domain name seems to make sense, but I want to make sure that we have the least amount of disruption. So my question is, what is the appropriate action to take from here?

-- JPMcGrath (talk) 22:40, 20 March 2010 (UTC)


 * No comments? Does anyone see any reason not to resume changing supremecourtus.gov to supremecourt.gov? -- JPMcGrath (talk) 08:09, 24 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, err, don't change links if the old ones work and the new ones break. It sounds like one of those "we'll burn that bridge when we get there" situations. I can't imagine that the U.S. Supreme Court would intentionally break all old links, but if they do at some point in the future, the links can be adjusted once they're actually broken. Preemptive URL guessing seems like a bad idea that's prone to breaking more than it fixes. --MZMcBride (talk) 12:23, 24 March 2010 (UTC)


 * There is nothing really preemptive about it - the new web site is up and the old one is going away. I have been checking, and I have not found any that are broken at supremecourt.gov that were not already broken.  Many of them are broken, in that they now redirect to http://www.supremecourt.gov/ rather than retrieve the intended file.  I am looking into whether I can write some scripts to check them all.  If I can do that, I can mark the dead ones with  and fix the ones that still work at the new domain -- JPMcGrath (talk) 14:07, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Outside of the contents of Category:Lists of United States Supreme Court opinions by term and Category:Lists of United States Supreme Court opinions by justice, all of which I have already taken care of, what articles have SCOTUS links? Are these just links to the pdfs of slip opinions in scattered individual case articles?  postdlf (talk) 15:27, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Special:LinkSearch/supremecourt.gov . --MZMcBride (talk) 15:32, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
 * It shouldn't be too hard to write a script that checks if the link is a 404. I looked at Special:LinkSearch a bit and it seems that neither supremecourt.gov or supremecourtus.gov are used very much. Both had less than 500 links, from what I saw. --MZMcBride (talk) 15:33, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Every day, I learn how to do something new on here... There are 939 uses of www.supremecourtus.gov on Wikipedia. There are 236 uses of supremecourtus.gov. So that's quite a lot of links to fix.

Just http://supremecourt.gov does not work, so any change will have to use the form http://www.supremecourt.gov. I've also discovered that some categories of pages have not otherwise kept the same URL with the domain name change: all of the opinion lists by term, such as slip opinions, in-chambers, opinions related to orders. So the content originally at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08slipopinion.html, for example, is now at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinions.aspx?Term=08. By contrast, the URLs for pdfs of opinions, such as http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/08pdf/07-1216.pdf, seem to be the same at the new domain name.

So I think the next step should be to review the link results above, and test for each category of links (bound volume lists, dockets, oral argument transcripts, etc.) to see which ones can be fixed with just a domain name change and which ones need to be completely changed. postdlf (talk) 15:58, 24 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I wrote a template that automatically included the relevant case links based on the volume it was being used on: SCOTUSLinks. It'd probably be a lot smarter to replace the current "External links" sections with the template. It looks like quite a few pages are already using the template. If someone has AWB and some extra time, standardization would be nice. It would mean being able to make one edit to a template rather than 545+ edits every time a link changes.... --MZMcBride (talk) 16:24, 24 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I will take a look at it tonight -- JPMcGrath (talk) 16:49, 24 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I just updated the reference to the "Dates of Supreme Court Decisions and Arguments" PDF link in the template.  It works fine in List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 13, so I guess I did that right.  There is still one more supremecourtus.gov link in there, but I did not change it because I did not have a test page to check it on. -- JPMcGrath (talk) 17:03, 24 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I updated all of the 559 List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume ### articles to use the SCOTUSLinks template. I also made some changes to the template itself:
 * Added a link to the Supreme Court Home page.
 * Added links to the corresponding "Bound Volumes" at supremecourt.gov for volumes 502-548
 * Expanded the range of volumes for the "Open Jurist" link (now goes up to 546), the "Justia" link (up to 559), and the "Find Law" link (now includes 1-150).
 * "Dates of Decisions" link is now included only for volumes 2-107.
 * Left in the "Case Finder" links, but marked it dead.
 * Improved documentation.
 * Does anyone know anything about the "Case Finder" links? Is there a replacement URL for them at the new site?  If not, is there any reason they should be retained?
 * -- JPMcGrath (talk) 23:41, 2 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I was confused by the "www." problem for a while, but figured it out earlier today. I just fixed all of the links to the Bound Volumes (using AWB), so there are fewer than there were before.  I think the External Links search lags behind the current state of the database, since it now shows 938 links to http://www.supremecourtus.gov, and I changed a lot more than one.


 * I also have noticed that there are some changes in locations at the new site. I will take a look at changing the slip opinion links tonight.  If you can identify any other pattern change like this one, I may be able to change them.  Once I have the pattern, it's not too bad.


 * -- JPMcGrath (talk) 16:47, 24 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I updated the slip opinion URLs. I also fixed the missing "www." in supremecourt.gov URLs -- JPMcGrath (talk) 03:15, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

I have been working on the Supreme Court URLs and have some details on the current state and some progress to report. I have created scripts that let me enumerate all of the links and check whether the target URLs exist.

In all, there are 2343 links to 780 URLs to the SCOTUS web sites, on 1319 pages. About half of those (1174 links, 419 URLs, 883 pages) now point to the new web site. The remainder are not working. Some of those could be updated, but those are on Talk pages, many of them archived.

In the main article space, there are 979 dead links to 270 URLs in 796 articles. These all currently point to the old www.supremecourtus.gov domain, and the matching URL in the new www.supremecourtus.gov domain does not exist. Most of the dead links are of one of the following two forms:


 * /opinions/casefinder/casefinder_####-####.html (471 links)
 * /docket/##-####.htm (391 links)

The "docket" links seem to be at different URLS at the new site. For example, http://www.supremecourtus.gov/docket/09-1061.htm can be found at http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.aspx?FileName=/docketfiles/09-1061.htm. The main page can also be found at http://www.supremecourt.gov/docketfiles/09-1061.htm without the menus and stuff. Since I have not seen the old pages and I could not get them from wayback, I cannot be certain these are the right ones. Could someone verify that this is correct?

As for the casefinder links, I could not find them on the new web site. If someone knows where to find them on the new site, please let me know.

-- JPMcGrath (talk) 23:44, 28 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I decided not to wait and updated the /docket/##-####.htm links. They all go through Template:SCOTUS URL Docket, so if this is wrong, they can all be changed easily. -- JPMcGrath (talk) 03:10, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

BTW
A Commons admin recently deleted the Scalia portrait that was then widely in use because it apparently wasn't an official Court portrait. The deletion itself is not an issue as far as I can see, but the problem is no one at Commons bothered to clean up the mess that was left. No notice was given and nothing was done about replacing its uses until I discovered it a week later. I'm less than satisfied with the answers I've gotten so far. See discussions and here. Thoughts? postdlf (talk) 01:43, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Article for Deletion
The following AfD may be of interest to editors here: Articles for deletion/Sessions of the United States Supreme Court -Rrius (talk) 01:51, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Just a separate opinion?
Please see thread here: Template talk:Infobox SCOTUS case. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:21, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Sandra Day O'Connor
There has to be a public domain portrait photograph of O'Connor available; Commons deleted the one that was in wide use as a copyrighted work of the SCOTUS historical society (I go on vacation for just a couple weeks and this is what happens). Aren't there official portraits of the Court that are taken by federal employees? postdlf (talk) 17:11, 13 May 2010 (UTC)


 * How about this one? Although being hosted on the LOC site does not mean it's public domain, its  "About This Item" entry says "Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication." TJRC (talk) 18:24, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
 * They don't have a record of the author. And the caveat "Rights assessment is your responsibility" confirms that Commons would (probably) not accept this.  postdlf (talk) 23:34, 13 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I notice that the photo is already on Commons, albeit with a slightly different resolution - it was uploaded on March 2, 2009. -- JPMcGrath (talk) 21:05, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Just a matter of time before that one gets deleted as well, given the unexplained PD tag. Maybe it's PD-USGov, but the author is not given.  postdlf (talk) 02:56, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm lost. Commons only deleted O'Connor's photo, but left similar photos like File:Anthony Kennedy Official.jpg? That doesn't make any sense. Nor does trying to argue that the Supreme Court historical society has any claim to these photos. Let me ask this: is there any evidence that these portraits are not works done by federal employees (and therefore public domain)? --MZMcBride (talk) 18:20, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

notability of SCOTUS cases
Aren't all SCOTUS cases notable for inclusion in Wikipedia? Can someone point me to where this laid down in the notability guidelines? I ask because some are saying SCOTUS cases are non-notable. --Rajah (talk) 17:15, 17 May 2010 (UTC)


 * They are definitely notable. Who is saying that they are not? -- JPMcGrath (talk) 18:48, 17 May 2010 (UTC)


 * What we usually refer to as "cases" here are in fact limited to bench opinions, i.e., the cases for which the Court gives full, written opinions explaining their decision. These days, there are about 80 or so of these a year (you can see this term's list so far here).  Mere cases would include thousands of lawsuits that get nothing more than summary decisions from the Court, most often to deny certiorari, but also often to vacate without any opinion; see list of SCOTUS orders here ("The vast majority of cases filed in the Supreme Court are disposed of summarily by unsigned orders.") (a "case" would also include every stage of a lawsuit from its inception at the trial court to its final resolution by the Supreme Court; our articles focus on the SCOTUS opinion, because typically the lawsuit itself would not otherwise be notable).  So every SCOTUS bench opinion certainly merits an article.  But not every SCOTUS case.
 * Even within the bench opinion, however, are per curiam opinions. These are "from the Court" and so do not have attributed authorship; they are typically short and less controversial (though still provoke dissents sometimes).  So we typically handle these in much more abbreviated form than the full bench opinions, in list articles rather than stand-alone articles (e.g., 2005 term per curiam opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States).  postdlf (talk) 00:25, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I was specifically talking about the US v. Comstock case that was decided yesterday. I started the article on it with a reference to washpost and the scotus pdf and another editor repeatedly place a notability template on it. I removed and it's no longer there. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, but I was annoyed at having to explain the notability of SCOTUS cases (specifically bench opinions as Postdlf mentions). It seemed that any SCOTUS bench decision of which there are about 80 as mentioned is certainly notable enough for inclusion in wikipedia. Also, you guys should add the text "all SCOTUS bench opinions are notable" or whatever to the proper section of the wikipedia:notability page (or just link to it from the wikiproject SCOTUS cases itself. Sorry this is so poorly written, IANAL :) --Rajah (talk) 01:07, 19 May 2010 (UTC)


 * The issue here is not really notability, but rather new pages patrol. The guy who tagged your article did it 11 minutes after you created the page, and you had made 3 additional revisions in that time.  WP:NPP deals with the issue rather explicitly:
 * "It is advisable to patrol new pages from the bottom of the first page of the log. This should give the creating editor enough time to improve a new page before a patroller attends to it, . . . . Tagging anything other than attack pages or complete nonsense a minute after creation is not constructive and only serves to annoy the page author."


 * If the article had been there for a day or two without references, his action might have made sense. However, tagging an article while someone is in the process of creating it is a bad idea, as it tends to annoy people who are making productive contributions, as you are clearly now aware.
 * -- JPMcGrath (talk) 03:23, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I totally agree, I thought the same thing about his immediate tagging with all the exclaimer tags. And I just noticed that notice yesterday also. It should be publicized more. --Rajah (talk) 03:39, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Berghuis v. Thompkins
I've done some work on this and put it up for GA review. Can someone from the WikiProject double check that it's adequate from a technical point of view? Barring minor edits I would hope it should be. Thanks. FT2 (Talk 13:38, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Problem with Justia links?
I just received this message on my talk page, I haven't had a chance to investigate:


 * FYI. The SCOTUS case links to Justia are no longer working (see the ones at List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 544). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.121.23.2 (talk) 14:34, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

postdlf (talk) 16:28, 14 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Works for me. The formatting looks a little odd, but it retrieves the page. — JPMcGrath (talk) 19:04, 14 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I think I figured out what the problem is. Justia hasn't updated the final citations in its database beyond volume 542 of the U.S. reports, even though SCOTUS has published full citations through vol. 552.  So when the citations were completed in the WP list articles, it messed up the Justia links for those volumes, which still use the docket number instead of the page number.  The consequence is that when I click on any of the justia links, as in the vol. 544 list article above, it just retrieves the text from Justia's home page at http://supreme.justia.com/.  postdlf (talk) 19:39, 14 June 2010 (UTC)


 * If this is your criticism against Justia, I'll have you know the very same problem exists with Findlaw's search/link design as well. The problem isn't the citation system itself. It's that most of these volumes after 544 haven't been officially bound (i.e., they are not a finished product, and thus pages are subject to potentially change). Sword cuts both ways. You need to be patient with the Clerk of the Court, since the Justices want the U.S. Reports to be as thoroughly without error as possible. Also, all you had to do was ask and I would have made a code to link to the docket numbers when I can find a spare moment. -- Foofighter20x (talk) 11:14, 15 June 2010 (UTC)


 * OK, I see which links you are talking about. I thought you meant the links to the Justia volume index page in the "External Links" section.


 * So, the problem is that, because of the inconsistency of the web site, the ussc template does not know how to link to appropriate web page for cases from volume 544 up and the template does not have the information it needs to do so. I think the best fix is to add a docket number parameter, then have the template figure out which to use based on the volume number.  That way, it can be switched if/when Justia updates the site to use the page number.


 * BTW, this is exactly what I was talking about in the discussion we had a few months back on my talk page. Changing the ID for the case from docket number to volume/page is bad system design, as is made more evident by this problem.  Time to enter the computer age, SCOTUS!


 * — JPMcGrath (talk) 00:09, 15 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't rush off just yet to do this. Findlaw itself doesn't support linking to volumes past 544 either. -- Foofighter20x (talk) 11:55, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
 * That's still two more volumes than Justia supports. postdlf (talk) 13:40, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't have the template expertise to implement that, so I've switched the template to Findlaw pending something better.--Chaser (talk) 00:22, 15 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I updated the template docs to reflect the change. I will take a look at the template when I get the chance.  — JPMcGrath (talk) 00:39, 15 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Why is this not being discussed on the Templates discussion page? It's called building consensus, folks. There's a lot of reasons why Justia was picked over Findlaw. Neither should anyone here have been making unilateral changes without dicussing this with other editors first. -- Foofighter20x (talk) 10:54, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
 * This discussion was linked to on the template discussion page. I started it here because I wasn't sure what the problem was at first other than that it had to do with Justia links in some SCOTUS list.  Try not to bite people's heads off when they're trying to fix a problem; I think everyone viewed switching to Findlaw right now as a temporary solution, and a better solution for now than letting the broken Justia links remain as is.  postdlf (talk) 13:44, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Test 1: Test 2: You will have to indicate that the year you enter is the year, and not the vol by putting a 3= ... -- Foofighter20x (talk) 12:11, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

New article review needed
Hello friends. I have just created a new article, Taylor v. Beckham, and would like your help in making sure it conforms to conventions for similar articles. I'm rather out of my element in creating such an article, but when I tried to get Kentucky gubernatorial election, 1899 classified as a good topic, one of the reviewers insisted that it needed this article to be complete. I am not a lawyer, and I don't play one on Wikipedia. Please feel free to correct anything in the article with regard to the formatting, legal terminology and notations, infobox information, or categorization. Also, since I'm going to have to get this thing designated as a good or featured article in order to complete the good topic, I'd appreciate any feedback you can give me on the content and how it may need to be improved. You can leave it here if you want, but I'd be more apt to see it on my talk page. Thanks in advance for your help. Acdixon (talk • contribs • count) 20:28, 22 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I made some formatting changes. BTW, the appropriate place for any discussion related to the article would be Talk:Taylor v. Beckham.  You can put the page on your watchlist if you want to know when changes are made (if it's not already there).  — JPMcGrath (talk) 23:01, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

new related WikiProject: United States Public Policy
Hi everyone! I want to invite anyone who's active here and has an interest in public policy to join WikiProject United States Public Policy, which is just starting up. Court cases, obviously, are one major part of U.S. public policy, so hopefully we'll be working on articles that are relevant to this project. We've got some cool things planned, including working with students and their professors for several public policy courses.--Sross (Public Policy) (talk) 13:18, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume X
The formatting of the List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume X (all of the articles that track the US Reports) is inconsistent. Up until and including Volume 203 the entries are in a table. From Volume 204 onwards, the entries are simply in a list. Has there been any discussion about making the articles consistent? If so, which format should be the winner? Verkhovensky (talk) 02:03, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I think a table would be better, because it could be made sortable. The default view would be in citation order, but then make the case name sortable so it can be alphabetized.
 * I think there's a bigger problem with these lists than lack of formatting consistency: lack of context. Most (all?) do not explain what "volume x" means in the introduction, and the list titles obviously don't give a clue to that either.  We in the know obviously know it refers to the United States Reports, but this needs to be clarified.  Also, these aren't lists of all cases, only all bench opinions.  All cases in a particular volume (at least in recent decades) would also include summary orders, of which there are thousands each term (mostly denials of certiorari).  So we need that explained in each introduction as well.  postdlf (talk) 02:15, 29 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Is there anyway to templatize these pages so that people don't have to change 550 of them every time they want to change something comparatively minor? Volume number and table data is the only thing that changes from one to the other.--Chaser (talk) 03:35, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
 * The intro could be easily written in a template format, presuming we want to say the same thing about each volume. The earlier ones need some different content; the first 90 will also have to explain that the cases initially appeared in the Supreme Court Reporter's own publication (Dallas, Wheat., etc.).  See also United States Reports, volume 1.  But I think that a templated intro could be done for the bulk of the lists.
 * First off though, can we agree on a mass rename for these? I suggest List of United States Supreme Court opinions in United States Reports volume XXX.  Wordy, but it's all necessary information.  Terming them "opinions" rather than "cases" is also key for reasons I noted above.  postdlf (talk) 06:00, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

How do I put up an article for Good Article review? (Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha)
Please see query at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Law

Thanks

Andrew Gradman talk/WP:Hornbook 18:39, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's ready; I agree with the comments given at your link above. Much of it looks like a law student's brief of a case for study purposes rather than an article, with lists of facts in incomplete sentences rather than substantive description.  The sections of it that are in prose look only loosely edited from portions of the syllabus or the opinion itself.  So it still needs a lot of development.  postdlf (talk) 22:46, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Concur, plus the article was assessed as a b-class article, while not meeting the requirements for that level. I re-assessed it as a c-class article, it needs significant work.   GregJackP    Boomer!  11:31, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

If the title of the court case is italicized in the lede of the article, why then is the article title not italicized? Is appropriate for these articles? If so, someone should request for a bot to tag each article with the template over at Bot requests. 64.85.223.249 (talk) 13:28, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Featured Article Candidate
Menominee Tribe v. United States is a Featured Article candidate. Any interested editors may participate, and can review the Featured article criteria prior to reviewing the article. GregJackP  Boomer!   01:46, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Category:United States Supreme Court case litigants
I'm considering listing this for deletion, but I wanted to see first if there was a way to salvage it.

There are undoubtedly some people who are notable only because of their role in a Supreme Court case, such as Dred Scott and Norma McCorvey. If this category could target those, it has some hope. But simply categorizing all SCOTUS litigants would involve an immense group of individuals, corporations, organizations, government agencies, U.S. states, and governments. Virtually every civil rights group would be included, every federal agency that had a rule or ruling challenged, every foreign government involved in a Alien Tort Claims Act or Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act case, the United States government itself because of federal prosecutions, and because of the Court's original jurisdiction, a fair number of U.S. states would be included as well (or probably every state because of the review of state supreme court decisions). Perhaps most damning though is the problem of nominal litigants, who are named in a case only by virtue of their office: these include the prison warden in any habeas petition, or the attorney general in any suit to invalidate a federal law, for example and the category's creator intended for those to be included as well by including John Ashcroft. And that's just dealing with lead parties...expand the world to all the additional parties, consolidated cases, etc... And "litigants" is broader than just those who were party to cases for which the Court handed down a full opinion; GVRs, possibly even just cert. petitions that were denied? Then you're dealing with thousands more cases every year. So I'm leaning heavily towards deletion. Any contrary opinions? postdlf (talk) 18:10, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Agree with Postdlf. I see no way of carving out a niche category of "very special litigants" without being indiscriminate, arbitrary, controversial etc. This, IMO, is the case where either a list or a proper article will fit the bill better - in case of a major topic directly related to SCOTUS, like "SCOTUS on labor relations", "SCOTUS on slavery" or etc. East of Borschov 19:34, 14 September 2010 (UTC)


 * The only future I see for it is in limiting it to individuals (by which I mean natural persons), but even then it will include people like Ashcroft or Gore. Better to delete it.--Chaser (talk) 23:25, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep and try a category name to Category:United States Supreme Court personal litigants, aside from a list, it is difficult to distinguish individuals from corporations for thse writting biographies on individual litigants. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 19:59, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Do you understand the problem with even that attempt to narrow its scope, given that you had added nominal parties to the category? Besides, "personal litigants" (a made up term) is a completely arbitrary distinction, because a corporation or government agency is no less a litigant to a case than a natural person.  postdlf (talk) 20:06, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Category listed for deletion here. postdlf (talk) 15:07, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

Schwarzenegger v. EMA
I'm a veteran with video game articles but not with law. Can anyone give a hand on the basic formatting of Schwarzenegger v. EMA relevant to SCOTUS cases? I'm sure I can take care of the article-writing part, but I'm completely stupid when it comes to law :) –MuZemike 01:13, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I wrote a basic stub on the case and filled in some of the infobox details. postdlf (talk) 13:49, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

naming guidelines
My apologies if this is written up explicitly somewhere, but do we have naming guidelines for the names for cases? For example is the "Inc." included if one of the parties is a company? -- Pink Bull  17:44, 28 September 2010 (UTC)


 * WP:NAME would say the most common name in English language reliable sources. I would not include Inc. It is Bluebook style, of course, but the Bluebook is ridiculous and this is a general reference source, not just a legal one.--Chaser (talk) 03:17, 14 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Lots of SCOTUS case articles have the "inc." or "LLC" in the article name. See Category:United States Supreme Court cases. Should we add the common name rule to this project's guidelines or perhaps to WP:NAME itself? -- Pink Bull  16:07, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

"Quimbee"?
Anyone else know anything about this external source, or have an opinion on whether we should have links to it? I've never seen it before. postdlf (talk) 22:43, 13 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Never heard of it—it looks like a generic case brief. Other cases link to similar case briefs (e.g., Marbury v. Madison links to brief on some website called "Lawnix"), but I haven't seen that one before. I'm not sure if the brief adds anything beyond what is already in the article, so perhaps it is unnecessary per WP:ELNO. Cheers, Stephen (talk) 02:43, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

United States related Tag and Assess proposal
There is a proposal on WikiProject United States to task Xenobot with tagging and assessment of articles that fall into the scope of WikiProject United States. Please take a few moments to provide your comments about this proposal.

If you are interested in joining WikiProject United States please add your name under the applicable section here. --Kumioko (talk) 17:08, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Berghuis v. Thompkins - peer review for FAC
I've put the above article up for peer review, to gain feedback how ready it is for FAC. Comments and involvement warmly welcomed and openly invited. Thanks - FT2 (Talk 00:00, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Invitation to help with WikiProject United States
--Kumioko (talk) 15:12, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

A consideration for cross project consolidation of talk page templates
I have started a conversation here about the possibility of combining some of the United States related WikiProject Banners into WikiProject United States. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please take a moment and let me know. --Kumioko (talk) 20:28, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Problem with an Article
I stumbled onto a disambiguation page that someone created that is mostly red links for articles not yet created. Since this pertains to your project, rather than delete it I thought I would leave a message here in case you want to create them as stubs for the time being rather than delete it. Here is a link United States v. Stewart. --Kumioko (talk) 17:44, 2 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I created a couple of them, but I disagree that pages like this need bluelinks to be useful. An encyclopedia is supposed to be helpful to its readers. If someone is searching for a case by this name on the internet and finds a bunch of irrelevant results, at least this Wikipedia article provides them with a complete list of cases with the same or similar titles. It also has case citations, years, and now links for each decision.--Chaser (talk) 18:32, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, personally I agree with you however the problem is the instructions for DAB page sspecifically states that DAB paegs shouldnt contain red links. There for Articles that exist not articles that might someday exist. --Kumioko (talk) 18:53, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Where's that now?--Chaser (talk) 19:11, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I think these pages are important to the project. It seems that we're all mostly in agreement here.  If the policy on DAB pages is really hostile to redlinks, then perhaps we should de-link the redlinks.  Then folks still go there when they search for United States v. Stewart, and the unlinked cases still tip folks off about what articles need to be created.  Verkhovensky (talk) 19:18, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The lists of SCOTUS opinions by volume also have many entries that need to be disambiguated, as can be seen from United States v. Stewart. These disambiguation pages are necessary to aid in the process of fixing those links, and so at a minimum should be maintained until all of those are fixed.  I'd also argue that whatever the merit generally of the DAB guideline against redlinks, it serves no purpose here but is instead counterproductive and should be ignored.  postdlf (talk) 19:31, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * As I mentioned before I never really did like the rule.:-) Lists are differnet btw. The red link rule doesn't apply to them ust to dab pages. --Kumioko (talk) 20:48, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

William J. Brennan
I'm considering a major revamp of this article, with the objective of having it promoted to FA status. If you want to help, that'd be great. Please reply here or on my talk page. Thank you. Shoplifter (talk) 18:38, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Suggested policy change to the tagging of non article items
I have submitted a proposal at the Village pump regarding tagging non article items in Wikipedia. Please take a moment and let me know what you think. --Kumioko (talk) 02:15, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Findlaw template deletion
FYI: Templates_for_discussion.--Chaser (talk) 04:15, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Wong Kim Ark; Afroyim; Terrazas
I've been working on United States v. Wong Kim Ark, Afroyim v. Rusk, and Vance v. Terrazas — three important citizenship law cases. Comments welcome. Rich wales (talk · contribs) 05:09, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Cases section of U.S. government portal
I created a section on the U.S. government portal for cases in the federal courts. Obviously these will tend to be Supreme Court cases. Changes, comments, and help keeping it up to date are welcome.--Chaser (talk) 05:59, 24 December 2010 (UTC)