Talk:Citizens United v. FEC

David Kairys Quote

I think there is a WP:NPOV issue with block quoting the David Kairys quote in the Criticism section without any type of clarity or explanation why this block quote deserves to be separated from being put in a proper area (academic criticism) while there is no other quote for the Support section. The inclusion of a quote makes it appear like there is added weight to this particular quote and skews the criticism section. 01:49, 6 December 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SamTyer86 (talk • contribs)

I agree that its placement at the very beginning of the Criticism section was poor. Kairys is an academic, so I moved it there and reformatted it as a "pull quote". (Note that all the commentary in the academic subsection is criticism...) AV3000 (talk) 03:01, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

(Right) Side Bar Summary

The summary of the case on the right side bar, under "Case Opinions" is misleading / confusing. Why does it say Concur/Dissent for the justices who Dissent? I wish I knew how to fix these figures, and if some editor knows how, please do fix it (... and if you have a moment, please also direct me to any how-to resources so I can make this type of correction in the future). Thank You! Jj1236 (talk) 07:19, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

It indicates partial concurrence/partial dissent, so no correction is called for, though you can propose any clarifying change to the template at Template_talk:Infobox SCOTUS case. AV3000 (talk) 14:39, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

The side bar mentions "Part IV" several times, but the article does not even mention "part iv". There should be at least a keyword in the side bar explaining what "part iv" is about. -- Austrian (talk) 20:54, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

But who was for one side and who was for the other? Came here for that information, but didn't find it and the Side Bar summary is just completely confusing. — al-Shimoni (talk) 18:56, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Background - Citizens United and Michael Moore

I am noticing that the current version of this article gives the impression that the FEC's rulings on Fahrenheit 911 and on Hillary: The Movie were inconsistent. Looking over the documents, it looks to me like the commission was consistent. Advertisements could not be broadcast during the restricted period in either case, but sales of recordings and cinema tickets in both cases constituted non-broadcast, commercial activity and did not fall under the BCRA rules. Perhaps someone with more legal expertise than me could clear up this question. 24.5.84.218 (talk) 20:55, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Missing part of the article

Missing is the sequence that led to Citizens United appearing in District Court initially. Did television executives (who?) refuse to air it? Did executives ask for guidance from the FEC? Did the ad(s) even get airtime? Who reported it to the FEC? "The District Court for the District of Columbia denied Citizens United's motion for a preliminary injunction to enjoin the Federal Election Commission ("FEC") from enforcing these provisions of the BCRA against Citizens United." From the site of footnote. ("disclosure requirements (reporting and disclaimers) imposed on "electioneering communications" by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 ("BCRA")") Did a television station report (disclose)? Did Citizens United disclose THEMSELVES?

Did the ad(s) actually run? If so, where, by whom, and how often? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mydogtrouble (talk • contribs) 17:27, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Upon further research, Citizens United DID initiate the court proceedings. They asked for the injunction prior to any action taken (according to http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/08-205

That might need to be specified. Mydogtrouble (talk) 18:00, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Relevance of ABC-Washington Post Poll

What's the point of including this poll in the article? Especially as the only one with a graphic. The wording of the poll itself discredits any findings and makes it irrelevant. 2620:0:1000:1402:26BE:5FF:FE0D:CDE0 (talk) 21:25, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Citizens United Redirect Reallocation Proposal

Closing per a WP:ANRFC request.
"Citizens United" should remain redirected to this page. Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 01:04, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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I propose that the redirect of “Citizens United” should rather be used for the actual organization, or a top-level organization listing, which indicates the different organizations with the same name. It doesn't make sense for the organization name to redirect to a SCOTUS ruling concerning the organization. ExParte ^{talk | contribs} 02:58, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose. The Supreme Court case is obviously the more likely search term, as this case is commonly referred to by just the name of the plaintiff. FYI, not every discussion needs an RfC. VQuakr (talk) 04:09, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose. The Supreme Court ruling is more notable than the organization. Hugh (talk) 06:07, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose. Supreme Court ruling is more notable and organization is linked from that page within the lede. Immortal Horrors or Everlasting Splendors 13:57, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose. Per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, it appears that the common usage and long-term significance of the term "Citizens United" are more likely to refer to the Supreme Court case than the organization that was a party to that case. -- Notecardforfree (talk) 08:54, 24 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose, first choice, keep as is. 2nd choice, redirect to Colbert Super Pac. Just kidding, keep as is. — Cirt (talk) 04:06, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

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The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Requested move 27 October 2015

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved Wbm1058 (talk) 04:22, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

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Citizens United v. FEC → Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – Shall we spell out "FEC"? George Ho (talk) 03:18, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

• Snow oppose. While I appreciate the desire to spell out acronyms that may appear obscure to some readers, MOS:LAW provides a direct answer to this question: "Articles on cases should be titled according to the legal citation convention for the jurisdiction that handled the case." According to the Bluebook (which is, for better or worse, the de facto lingua franca of American legal citations), "[s]ome entities with widely recognized initials, e.g., AARP, CBS, CIA, FCC, FDA, FEC, NAACP, NLRB, are commonly referred to in spoken language by their initials rather than by their full names; such abbreviations may be used without periods in text, in case names, and as institutional authors" (see B4.1.2 and R6.1(b)). Furthermore, R10.2 states that these commonly used abbreviations should be used in case titles. Therefore, the current title is appropriate. Best, -- Notecardforfree (talk) 07:55, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

You can't "snow" vote; we don't know whether others feel the same way. Also, I don't think FEC is recognizable to everyone. George Ho (talk) 09:32, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

My point is that this is one of those rare situations where the Manual of Style provides a direct, unambiguous answer to the question presented. I cited WP:SNOWBALL in the hopes that this RfC can be wrapped-up as soon as possible (after the mandatory seven-day period), pursuant to relevant portions of the MOS. -- Notecardforfree (talk) 09:57, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

• Snow oppose. MOS:LAW, WP:SNOWBALL. Hugh (talk) 14:51, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose per MOS:LAW with those above. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 16:52, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose Notecardforfree spells it out pretty clearly. VQuakr (talk) 01:17, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Requested move of Citizens United (organization) over Citizens United

I've started a requested move at Talk:Citizens United (organization)#Requested move 27 October 2015, following the ongoing discussion at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2015_October_27#Citizens_United. I suggest that the organization is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and should be moved over this redirect, with a hatnote to the legal case. I appreciate that this was discussed about a month ago here, but feel it did not have a wide enough audience to reflect broad consensus. (Listing here to get a broader audience; Talk:Citizens United redirects to this talk page.) Si Trew (talk) 09:17, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Citizens United v. FEC

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Citizens United v. FEC's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Politicker":

• From Ben Cohen (businessman): Alex Isenstadt (2008-02-09). "Ben Cohen endorses Obama". PolitickerVT.com. Retrieved 2008-07-11.
• From Stamp Stampede: KEN PICARD (2012-11-21). "Ben Cohen Has a Plan to Purge Money from Politics: Stamp It Out". Seven Days. Retrieved 2012-12-03.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 08:34, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Page title

Hi. I think the page title should be Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, not Citizens United v. FEC. The move rationale provided by Good Olfactory in January 2015 doesn't make any sense to me. We shouldn't be following Bluebook for page titles, but even if we were, I think "Federal Election Comm'n" is what would be used, not FEC. Anyone have any thoughts or objections to a page move? --MZMcBride (talk) 23:13, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

I agree with the first suggestion. It would be the most popular and vernacular name choice, and would aid our readers. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 23:20, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

• Note that I rejected the deletion request because it appears to be in line with the naming convention at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Legal. MZMcBride, why do you think that we should ignore this naming convention's proscription of following "Bluebook format, normally"? Article names need to obey established conventions, so unless this is an exceptional, WP:IAR, situation for ignoring the guideline completely, or one of the ordinary exceptions (the reasons they say "normally"), I see no reason to deviate, especially if we're using the vernacular in defiance of what the scholars use. Of course, your suggestion that "Comm'n" is more compliant with Bluebook is completely different; I'm not familiar with Bluebook, so I can't have a solid opinion on that. Nyttend (talk) 23:22, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Hi Nyttend. I'm having difficulty parsing your reply. You seem to be saying that we should follow Bluebook, but then also saying that you're unfamiliar with Bluebook. This seems like it would make it difficult to enforce a propriety style guide.

    Our article on the Federal Election Commission lives at Federal Election Commission, not FEC or FEC (United States) or similar. We typically avoid abbreviations in page titles. The common name of the case is "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission", looking at citations such as Oyez.org and SCOTUSblog. I'm not asking anyone to ignore rules here, I'm asking for a bad page move to be undone. I'd also like it if we were internally consistent in how we use abbreviations in page titles.

    Do you object to the page title being "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission"? If so, why? --MZMcBride (talk) 23:32, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

    • You said We shouldn't be following Bluebook for page titles; your words seem to be a rejection of the naming convention. Unless I've misunderstood you, or unless you can demonstrate a solid WP:IAR reason for rejecting the convention here, we have no reason to listen to that suggestion, because aside from an IAR situation, we are required to obey naming conventions. I have no opinion on your suggestion that "Com'n" is a better way to comply with Bluebook, because you're obviously trying to go along with the convention there, so either opposing or supporting would require familiarity with Bluebook. Nyttend (talk) 23:45, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
      • Hi Nyttend. The naming convention that you're citing (Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Legal) is a guideline that stresses applying common sense, while Wikipedia:Article titles is a policy that says that we prefer the common name. Looking at <http://www.access-to-law.com/citation/basic_legal_citation.pdf>, it appears that the Bluebook name for this case would actually be Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm'n (cf. pages marked 122 and 123). Using Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm'n as the primary page title would be completely against common sense and sound editorial judgment, in my opinion. (It's fine as a redirect, of course.) While you seem eager to cite "Ignore all rules," it's inapplicable here. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:53, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
• The Bluebook recommends using "FEC" and other commonly used acronyms (such as FCC, FTC, NLRB, NCAA) in case names. Whether we use Bluebook is of course a separate issue, but I was simply implementing the recommendation at Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Legal#Article_titles. To deviate from the Bluebook standard, I suppose we should have a consensus, since the way it's worded, it's the "normal" or usual format that is used for U.S. cases. This guideline has been reworded a bit since I moved the article to allow for more flexibility. I note that the issue is broader than this single article, since there are a number of articles in Category:Federal Election Commission litigation that have "FEC" in the article name. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 03:45, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
  • It seems worth noting that Category:Federal Election Commission litigation is the name of the category, not Category:FEC litigation. While this is obviously a category and not a case name, it points to the accepted practice of typically not abbreviating in page titles on Wikipedia. Shouldn't we be internally consistent? --MZMcBride (talk) 19:10, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
• @MZMcBride: since you don't seem to specifically mention it, I've gotta ask - did you see the move discussion from Oct 27 a couple of sections up? VQuakr (talk) 07:08, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Nope, totally missed it. Thanks for pointing it out. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:03, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Notecardforfree: You quoted Bluebook the previous discussion about this page title. Do you have an online reference for Bluebook? GregJackP pointed me to <http://www.access-to-law.com/citation/basic_legal_citation.pdf>, but it doesn't seem to include what you're quoting (or maybe I'm just bad at searching). It seems very problematic for Wikipedia to be relying on a seemingly proprietary and closed-source style guide, but I may just be missing something very obvious here. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:15, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

MZMcBride, I don't think there is a free, publicly accessible version of the Bluebook online. In the RFC above, I cited the hard copy of the Bluebook that I keep in my office (I think I have the 19th edition). To be honest, I've been thinking a lot about this discussion over the last few days. Ultimately, I think it is more important for articles about legal cases to use a consistent naming convention than it is to be consistent between articles that have "Federal Election Commission" in their name. For the longest time, I understood MOS:LAW's title policy to require that articles follow Bluebook conventions, though in recent weeks I have come to the realization that it might make more sense to abbreviate SCOTUS case titles according to the title that appears in the U.S. Reports or slip opinions (incidentally, the title that appears in the U.S. Reports is "Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm'n" -- see p. 310 of Volume 558). That said, I think it might be time to start an RfC at WT:LAW (or somewhere else) to find consensus about how to title articles for legal cases. -- Notecardforfree (talk) 19:47, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

At the risk of being labeled as too pragmatic, I am not sure how much this all matters. It can be taken care of by a redirect. However or whichever way it goes. Let common sense be our guiding principal. It is only important the the readers can find it, and that they get the case name right. This is a tempest in a teapot. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 19:58, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Support original poster move suggestion (in conjunction with a redirect from the abbreviated version ...FEC of course) based on WP:READERSFIRST than MOS:LAW or the Bluebook; no objection to move. Oppose "Fed. Election Comm'n" except as redirect. On the broader issue, I would be interested in participating in an RfC, mainly to comment in favor of an alternative to the Bluebook which is available online to all editors, and is simpler; I don't think we should incorporate by reference, into our MOS, sources which are copyright protected and available online only per fee. Thanks. Hugh (talk) 20:15, 23 December 2015 (UTC)