Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alan R. Schwartz

Alan R. Schwartz

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Alan R. Schwartz (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Per WP:USCJN, state appellate judges are not inherently notable. BD2412 T 21:25, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions. BD2412 T 21:25, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: People and Florida. Shellwood (talk) 22:08, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

• BD2412, you nominated for deletion four articles regarding judges (Juan Ramirez Jr.; Angel A. Cortiñas; David M. Gersten; Alan R. Schwartz), within the span of two minutes, with identical descriptions. Likewise, while you state in each that "state appellate judges are not inherently notable", you do not address why each individual judge is not notable; plenty of people are notable, even if not bestowed inherently by job title. With that in mind, and given that the AfD guidelines have a checklist of steps to carry out before nominating an article, what steps did you take to assess the notability of this particular judge before nominating the article for deletion? --Usernameunique (talk) 07:59, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Rather than copy-pasting one answer four times, I will answer here and then refer back to this answer in the other discussions. I did my research on all four subjects before posting the set of nominations. All of them, by reference to their most recent available information, have held no higher office than the serving on the same court of appeals. Schwartz died in 2019; Ramirez returned to private practice as a mediator; Cortiñas returned to private practice in a firm; Gersten also returned to private practice in a firm. All of their activities are routine for a state appellate judge; they have given speeches and served on committees and taught classes as adjunct professors, but have held no higher office nor full professorships. BD2412 T 18:19, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

• Delete I did find some mentions of him, but nothing extensive. He seems to be known for having referred to "gotcha" cases in here, and he wrote an analysis of airline safety after Lockerbee: Schwartz, Alan R., and Michael J. Bayer. "Pan Am Flight 103 and the Aviation Security Improvement Act of 1990." The Logistics and Transportation Review, vol. 28, no. 1, Mar. 1992, pp. 61+. But I don't find anything that would rise to GNG. Lamona (talk) 03:05, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Keep So shouldn't the criteria for keeping or deleting be more than just the title or office of the person, and instead what she/he did while in the office? A minor officeholder can make a big impact (good or bad) (for example, Rosemarie Aquilina is a low level state court trial judge, but she made a major impact during the Nassar trial). Judge Schwartz, in his almost 30 years on the bench, authored 944 opinions. To dismiss him as delete-ably routine simply because he was just an appellate judge really glosses over what he did as an appellate judge. In 3 minutes of looking at some of his decisions and sorting by the number of times those decisions were cited by other courts, I was able to find 2 significant and interesting (well, at least interesting to lawyers) decisions that made law. His decisions, his reasoning and writings will continue to influence the application of law for likely decades to come. Significance and notability should be more than surface level deep, and the contributions a person makes should be a factor just as much as a person's perceived social importance. Today's flash-in-the-pan celebrity will be gone in 15 seconds; this man's work will live on and impact real people. The article needs work and more research, no doubt, to identify and analyze decisions and the impact of those decisions. But aborting the notion of his notability on what might be cursory research (hopefully more than just a google search...), favors the potentially less-serious-more-notorious people over those who are serious and impactful but not flashy. Judge Schwartz seems serious and impactful. Let this article live on; maybe somebody will fill it out more oneday. Leglamp123 (talk) 00:48, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Leglamp123, thanks for the link to the Court Listener list of decisions. (I find it particularly interesting the search terms "author_id:6756 OR panel_ids:6756" and would love for there to be instructions somewhere here on WP on how to discover those ids.) Looking through the notability criteria I am unable to find a policy that would support this article. All of the wp:Notability_(people) criteria, including those in wp:Notability_(people)#cite_note-note6-8 refer to "in depth, independently in multiple news feature articles". We have a separate set of criteria for academics that takes into account their publications and impact through citations and that does not require main-stream third-party sources, but we do not have any stated policy that would cover judges. You say that he authored 944 opinions. I have no idea if that is a lot for a career judge. Admitting that our criteria for notability is lacking for judges, what does that number of opinions represent in the juridical realm? An average amount? A huge amount? Are there awards that would follow, or are those not an aspect of that type of work? Thanks, Lamona (talk) 17:28, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

@Lamona, that's a thoughtful question, and a hard one to develop criteria for. In the legal profession generally, a lawyer's reputation is mostly known inside that specific legal practice area (not dissimilar from academics); except for personal injury lawyers who advertise on TV or buy those SuperLawyer rankings, the legal community frowns upon overt self-promotion or boasting, and prefers to be known by word-of-mouth reputation - and that's practicing lawyers. Judges are even more adverse to attention, and between that and judicial canons / code of conduct, judges almost never grant interviews or author non-judicial opinion pieces...so as a result, the news universe finds most judges pretty boring most of the time. So like academics/professors, the real reputation of judges is known within the small insider circle of other lawyers and judges.

There aren't really any awards or rankings, at least none that serious lawyers and judges take seriously or that would easily appear on google. Coming up with some type of objective-ish metric isn't easy. @Berian has a good start in his lawyer standards.

So this would be my suggestion to try to apply a metric: an impactful judge who is respected by her/his peers, who authors compelling legal decisions, is often quoted/cited by other courts in other legal decisions. Impactful decisions are often cited in or the subject of scholarly law review articles. So an idea would be to look at how often a judge's decision is cited in by other courts, particularly a state's highest court (in Florida that would be the Supreme Court), by federal appellate courts, and most rare of all, the U.S. Supreme Court. And look at how often a judge's decision is cited by law review articles. Often those two will go hand in hand - if cited by numerous courts, chances are a decision will be cited by numerous law review articles - a sign that the judge has made some type of impact in the legal universe. Here, for instance, is a small list of the top top top who's who of cited/respected jurists.

Perhaps a criteria building off of Berian's, something like a notable judge will have authored at least X decisions (10?) that have been positively cited by a state's highest court, a federal appellate court, or SCOTUS, or has been cited in a law review article.

I know Lexis and Westlaw have means of tracking most court citations, and also law review articles; not sure if a free service does the same. Leglamp123 (talk) 17:48, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

@Leglamp123: I don't think CourtListener.com is usable as a source. My understanding is that it is user-generated content, like a wiki, and not fact-checked. BD2412 T 19:15, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi @BD2412 - CourtListener, like PACER, Westlaw, Lexis, or the actual bound printed legal reporter casebooks in law libraries they make 1st year law students use, publishes court decisions (which are, as you know, a government public record and gold-standard source). The court decisions themselves are the actual source, and each appellate court decision, and some trial decisions, have both a court docket number and a reporter citation (e.g. the 2000 SCOTUS case Bush v. Gore is docket number 2000-949 and is cited as 531 U.S. 98, or 121 S. Ct. 525, or 148 L. Ed. 2d 388, or 2000 U.S. LEXIS 8430). It is the court decisions themselves that are the source, not the publisher of the court decision (anyone can access and publish a public record, so there are thousands of court decision publishers). The publisher is not important - they all do the same thing - the important thing / source is the court decision, which absolutely is a source, and is referred to by the reporter citation (e.g. 531 US 98 (2000)), and usually not by the publisher (e.g. use the 531 US 98 citation to refer to Bush v. Gore, not a link to CourtListener. Leglamp123 (talk) 22:58, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

What little content we have at CourtListener does not seem to indicate such a status. BD2412 T 00:38, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi @BD2412 - Can you please clarify what you mean when you say that "CourtListener ("CL") wiki does not seem to indicate such a status?" I'm not sure I understand. If you're saying the CL wiki is not complete and should be updated for completeness because it does not include my opinion that it is a publisher of reported opinions, I don't have an opinion, except to note the wiki you referenced does state, in a bullet point, that CL provides, among other things, more than 3 million judicial opinions. If you're saying that you disagree with my statement that CL is a publisher of reported judicial opinions, please explain (a) why you believe same; and (b) how you reconcile your belief that CL does not publish judicial opinions against the fact that CL has massive quantities of cited, reported, published opinions. Thanks! Leglamp123 (talk) 01:02, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia's content on CourtListener, in full, is "CourtListener, is an open source software project to archive and host court documents". Hosting court documents does not make a source reliable with respect to the notability of judges, or indeed with respect to their biographical data. I have used CL plenty as a way to find items of information from which to track down reliable sources about judges, but never as a source for articles on the subjects themselves. BD2412 T 01:22, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Hiya @BD2412 - perhaps I've not been clear enough. I am not suggesting CL is a source in and of itself - who cares about CL? - I am suggesting that the court documents themselves (e.g. reported opinions) are a reliable source with respect to, and probably a key factor in determining, the notability of the judges. The reported opinions - regardless of where hosted - is what makes a judge notable in the world of judicial opinions, particularly when cited by other judicial opinions and academic journals. IMO a judge with notable reported opinions meets the notability requirement (similar to WP:PROF) even though the judges' biographies might not be the subject of secondary sources. Leglamp123 (talk) 01:39, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Keep - as a totality, this judge passes my standards, especially as the chief judge of an intermediate court. Bearian (talk) 18:42, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

• @Bearian: I am unaware of any criteria for inclusion that gives weight to chief judge status on a regional (not statewide) intermediate appellate court. As far as I know, the office in Florida DCAs is administrative, and holds no particular legal authority. BD2412 T 21:19, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

  Almost all chief judges and chief justices are administrative in nature; their legal authority derives from the authority granted to the appellate court as a whole. Leglamp123 (talk) 00:31, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Legoktm (talk) 05:44, 2 March 2023 (UTC)