Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases

2 new cases

If anyone's interested in helping flog two of my new articles into the "Did You Know" section of the main page in the next couple of days before they're "too old", I just wrote up the patent cases Sears, Roebuck & Co. v. Stiffel Co. and Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., and added them to Template talk:Did you know ... if anyone would like to verify or otherwise shove them through the pipeline into the DYK section of the main page. Thanks! Tempshill (talk) 19:11, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Case assessments

I've just finished going through all the Start class articles and reassessing them. I've change quite a few to C class articles and a few to B class. I'll probably continue with the stubs, a few of which I've notice should be promoted. My real question is why there are so many B class articles and so few Good and A class articles. Maybe we can go through the B class articles and find a few candidates for promotion and make a team effort to push a few over the top. I think the largest problem is the absence of citations in many articles. That means going through the cases and finding the citations, which I know can be tedious, but which is really necessary. Suggestions?--Cdogsimmons (talk) 04:44, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

I've been going through some of these cases. The biggest, most glaring issue I see right now is a complete lack of standardization. Headers are different everywhere. Introductions are different everywhere. There's no consistency anywhere. I'd be interested in helping formulate (and then execute!) a standardized layout. (I realize this isn't really related to your post.) Any thoughts? --MZMcBride (talk) 09:42, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm all for standardization. I just think it's a shame that there is only one case article that is ranked as a "featured article" and no "A" class articles. Considering that there are over 250 articles ranked as "B" class, I don't think it should be that hard to focus on a few that are close with a group effort. It just means deciding which cases to focus on. Obviously we all have our own interests in the law. Mine happens to be the First Amendment so I'd love to see Brandenburg v. Ohio, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, and New York Times Co. v. United States be promoted. However, other very important articles might be closer to a "Good article" level like Bush v. Gore or Dred Scott v. Sandford. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cdogsimmons (talk • contribs)

Well, you seem to be focusing on the big picture while I'm focusing on the smaller one. :-) But the two actually work well together. Getting an article featured would likely create a layout that can be emulated for all of the other articles.... --MZMcBride (talk) 19:56, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

I guess we should look at our only featured article then, Roe v. Wade, and see why it endured as a featured article, while the others failed.--Cdogsimmons (talk) 19:58, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to gut the subject-space page a bit. Specifically, the outline versus the alternate outline need to be replaced with a unified form for SCOTUS cases. At the moment I'm mostly curious if anybody cares or if I should just be bold. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:04, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Dispute on SCOTUS case

Just to let you know that there is a dispute on this SCOTUS case, Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc. (see talk page). Third opinions welcomed... Cheers, --Edcolins (talk) 21:35, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

tl;dr? --MZMcBride (talk) 16:23, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Coordinators' working group

Hi! I'd like to draw your attention to the new WikiProject coordinators' working group, an effort to bring both official and unofficial WikiProject coordinators together so that the projects can more easily develop consensus and collaborate. This group has been created after discussion regarding possible changes to the A-Class review system, and that may be one of the first things discussed by interested coordinators.

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DYK Hook problems

I've been trying to get an article I did some work on, Will v. Michigan Dept. of State Police, into the Did You Know section on the main page but the hook that I created is too long. The discussion is at Template_talk:Did_you_know#Articles_created.2Fexpanded_on_February_21. I don't know how to shorten it any further while still adequately representing the holding of the case. Any suggestions people might have would be appreciated.--Cdogsimmons (talk) 00:09, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Article alerts

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Thanks. — Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 09:47, 15 March, 2009 (UTC)

A question on USR

I find that the cases listed as being in United States Reports are all formatted as Supreme Court cases (Infobox, templates, the heading of the navigation template for USR says they are all Supreme Court cases, etc.), despite the fact that many of the early cases (Including all of Volume 1) have nothing to do with the Supreme Court, and some are even from before the United States existed! Is this intentional? EG. does the fact that a court cases is in USR cause it to be grandfathered in as a Supreme Court case? Thanx, 76.117.247.55 (talk) 20:53, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

You're talking about lists articles such as List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 1, which list the contents of the United States Reports. You're right that the earliest volumes contained other materials besides SCOTUS cases. Of course that doesn't make those other reported decisions SCOTUS decisions just because of where they are reported. You raise a valid concern about accuracy; the standardized form of these list articles focuses on SCOTUS because that's why they were created, to list all SCOTUS cases. So what's the best solution? Rename all to List of opinions published in volume X of the United States Reports? "Opinions" is preferable to "cases," btw, because we are only bothering to list opinions; we're not merely listing all cases that are decided without opinions (such as the many thousands of denials of certiorari, which do get listed in the U.S. Reports). Postdlf (talk) 21:41, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Just a note to say that if a new naming scheme is chosen, please have a script do it. It's pure silliness to have a human move 545+ pages (especially when a script can do it in seconds). :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 04:14, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Disambiguation

Upon rolling the dice at Special:Random, I ended up at List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 194. I note that the two entries that aren't redlinks both actually point to the wrong article, and should be redlinks; Gibson v. United States is about a similarly-named case from 1946, and The United States points, well, to where you would expect it to point. I was going to change the links back to redlinks with better titles, when I realized that this (duplicate case names) probably happens all the time (especially the The United States title, I bet), and you folks probably already have a disambiguation system, and I might as well not try to reinvent the wheel.

So, for Supreme Court cases like this, if two case share a title, do you disambiguate with the year of the decision? The citation number? Since the current Gibson v. United States is the only one with an article, it would be silly to move it to Gibson v. United States (1946), right? At least until the other Gibson case gets an article?

My instinct would be to change the link for the 1904 case to Gibson v. United States (1904), and the The United States ruling to The United States (1904 Supreme Court case), and leave the current Gibson v. United States where it is. Should I follow that instinct, or is there a system? Or (seeing as how they're all redlinks anyway) is this early enough in your project that I shouldn't waste my time with this stuff, and you all will get to it eventually, in a more systematic way? --Floquenbeam (talk) 22:59, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Disambiguation is usually used when two articles want to share a name, but can't. Obviously links are a problem, too, but these lists probably get more traffic from Special:random than anything else. That said, if you want to fix them, by date seems to be the standard. But there are over 500, so developing some sort of bot to determine whether there's more than one incoming link to each name would be the way to go (excluding already existing articles, perhaps?). MZMcBride would be the one to ask about that, but I'm not sure he'll think it's worth it for every list. I don't.--chaser - t 02:39, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, we've known about that issue since the lists were created. Someone even went through at some point and added notes to the talk page for some of the lists. (Why they didn't just fix them is a bit bizarre to me....) And others have spot-corrected some of them. It might be possible to go through each and correct them, though I'm not particularly inclined. The convention for conflicting titles is to add the year at the end. That's fairly standardized as far as I'm aware. What really needs to be done is to go through each list, add decision dates and verify case names and such. But with 30,000 cases, it's a bit of a chore, to say the least. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:45, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies. I'll go ahead and fix the two I found, just because (now that I know about them) it would annoy me if I just left them there. But I'll defer to this project, and to a future bot, to think about and fix the rest more systematically. --Floquenbeam (talk) 16:19, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Case citation links

There is a thread regarding our (and others') longstanding convention to link case citations in the first few words of our articles to the article on case citations. Please contribute your thoughts as to whether such links should be removed here.--chaser (talk) 14:57, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

• I think I actually started that practice. The idea was that non-lawyers might find case citation forms to be somewhat aliens, so we should give them some guidance as to their meaning. Perhaps, as we add articles on the Federal Reporter volumes, we should just link to those instead. bd2412 T 15:32, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
  • That's what I'd prefer as well, I've posted a comment in favor at the above talk page. Postdlf (talk) 15:40, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

• /me waves. Good to see everyone. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 16:48, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

GA Sweeps invitation

This message is being sent to WikiProjects with GAs under their scope. Since August 2007, WikiProject Good Articles has been participating in GA sweeps. The process helps to ensure that articles that have passed a nomination before that date meet the GA criteria. After nearly two years, the running total has just passed the 50% mark. In order to expediate the reviewing, several changes have been made to the process. A new worklist has been created, detailing which articles are left to review. Instead of reviewing by topic, editors can consider picking and choosing whichever articles they are interested in.

We are always looking for new members to assist with reviewing the remaining articles, and since this project has GAs under its scope, it would be beneficial if any of its members could review a few articles (perhaps your project's articles). Your project's members are likely to be more knowledgeable about your topic GAs then an outside reviewer. As a result, reviewing your project's articles would improve the quality of the review in ensuring that the article meets your project's concerns on sourcing, content, and guidelines. However, members can also review any other article in the worklist to ensure it meets the GA criteria.

If any members are interested, please visit the GA sweeps page for further details and instructions in initiating a review. If you'd like to join the process, please add your name to the running total page. In addition, for every member that reviews 100 articles from the worklist or has a significant impact on the process, s/he will get an award when they reach that threshold. With ~1,300 articles left to review, we would appreciate any editors that could contribute in helping to uphold the quality of GAs. If you have any questions about the process, reviewing, or need help with a particular article, please contact me or OhanaUnited and we'll be happy to help. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 06:39, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Allison Engine v. United States ex rel. Sanders

President Obama today signed a bill (the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act) which, among other things, amends the False Claims Act to reverse the Court's ruling last year in Allison. It would be timely if someone could come up with an article about this case. (Near as I can tell, none of the Court's False Claims Act cases have been written up; Allison is merely the most recent. There's another one on the docket this year.) 121a0012 (talk) 02:47, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I started the Allison article, although I don't know if I'll have time to do any more work on it than that. 121a0012 (talk) 05:14, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

United States v. Santos

The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009 also reverses the limitation on clarifies the definition of proceeds in the money-laundering statute pronounced considered in United States v. Santos. I think that makes four times so far this Congress in which the Roberts court's statutory construction has been reversed disputed by Congress. In any event, if someone could write that article, I'd be most grateful. There's a Congressional Research Service report about the issue at [1] (PDF). 121a0012 (talk) 05:38, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Slight corrections 121a0012 (talk) 05:40, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Notability of SCOTUS decisions

Are all SCOTUS decisions inherently notable? This question came up at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Douglas v. City of Jeannette and I originally argued for the notabiity of all SCOTUS decisions. However, on reflection, I realized that I've seen some SCOTUS decisions that don't seem to be worth much of a Wikipedia article (basically ones that say "Eh, appeals court is wrong, go back and look at it again" but don't really have any effect on constitutional law). --Richard (talk) 05:46, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Copyright status of SCOTUS decisions

Another question that came up at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Douglas v. City of Jeannette. Are SCOTUS decisions in the public domain? I assume they are because they are effectively products of the U.S. government. However, Findlaw.com puts a copyright notice on the web page of each SCOTUS decision that they make available online. Does the copyright notice apply to the text of the SCOTUS decision or only to the other elements on the web page? --Richard (talk) 05:49, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Definitely and utterly in the public domain. There is a doctrine which states that all reported decisions, whether by state or federal courts, are PD based on the right of the citizen to know what the law is. Federal court decisions are, of course, also PD as U.S. government work product. Findlaw can only copyright its peculiar presentation and add-ons (although even this is suspect). bd2412 T 05:55, 29 May 2009 (UTC)