Talk:Minor v. Happersett/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Wizardman (talk · contribs) 03:18, 30 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'll review this article. No reason it should have had to wait 4 months. Comments will be up within 30 hours, ideally within two. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 03:18, 30 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

An interesting article; did not know that there was an original Supreme Court ruling on that issues, always assumed the states all decided it. Anyway, here are my issues:

I was going to ask about making the images larger, but since Minor's barely a 100px image to begin with I understand keeping both small for consistency.
"Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan II included Minor in a list of "decisions of this Court which are disregarded or, more accurately, silently overruled today".[19]" This almost feels like quoting for the sake of quoting, and could probably be put in your own words without difficulty.
There are very few contemporary sources. While it's of course not a requirement, are there other recent scholarly works that could be beneficial in adding to the article?

Just a couple minor nitpicks. The article's a bit short, but given the unanimous ruling and early date it's more than understandable. I'll put the article on hold and pass it when the issues are fixed. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 03:36, 30 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. Thanks for working on the review for this article.

My impression is that there just isn't very much said in modern times about Minor v. Happersett, partly because it's an old case, and partly because it was mostly overruled by the 19th Amendment (which gave women the right to vote). Mentions of Minor in modern law review articles are pretty much limited to footnotes citing the case. And it might have stayed completely obscure except that some of the anti-Obama "birther" crowd have taken to prooftexting the Law of Nations paraphrase about natural-born citizenship, claiming that the Supreme Court definitively established a very narrow definition for Presidential eligibility (and refusing to accept the principle of holdings vs. dicta). The sources saying this are essentially all fringe blogs (and thus not reliable sources), and the mainstream legal community has pretty much completely ignored the issue. As you can see from the article's talk page, we discussed the idea a while ago of mentioning the "birther" misinterpretation of Minor (if only to alert people who might come to the article that the natural-born-citizen verbiage is being misused), but the consensus went against saying anything along those lines at all.

I'll take a look at that Harlan quote. Am I correctly understanding you to be saying that the existing image sizes are OK? As you noted, the photo of Virginia Minor (from Commons) is already tiny. — Rich wales 03:56, 30 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I replaced the Harlan quote with a paraphrase. I'm looking around in hopes of finding a suitable secondary source to use here, so far without success. — Rich wales 04:24, 30 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the existing images are ok. I won't worry about extra sources, since as you say there's not much out there recently, so I'll pass the article. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 05:04, 30 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again for your help with this. — Rich wales 05:27, 30 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]