Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases/Archive 15

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Archive 15

Clay v. Sun Insurance Office, Ltd.

Clay v. Sun Insurance Office, Ltd. presents an interesting, though frankly hardly novel situation raising a question of how to organize information about a case that went to the Supreme Court more than once. Here, the case went up in 1960, was remanded, and went back up in 1964 to be resolved. The facts of the underlying case did not change, so it seems somewhat odd to me that our default would be to have two separate articles on the two appearances of the case before the court. On the other hand, it would also be somewhat odd to have two SCOTUS case infoboxes with different information in the same article, though I think that would ultimately be the best solution. I leave it to more experienced hands than mine to solve this conundrum. Cheers! BD2412 T 05:03, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

@BD2412: Benisek v. Lamone uses the two-infobox idea, so it wouldn't be totally unprecedented. By contrast, we have three separate articles on the NOW v. Scheidler litigation, e.g. this one. (The "case history" section of that article's infobox is quite something.) If the legal issues in the two cases are sufficiently similar, I'd just stay with one article. But ultimately, to quote the first of the Benisek opinions, any such decision will assuredly be "within the sound discretion" of the editor making it. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 05:23, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Okay then, I've modified it to be a two-for-one, which I think is most sound given the posture of the case. If in the future the article is substantially expanded, splitting is always an option. BD2412 T 05:37, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

My take is that they're nearly always two different cases enunciating two different holdings of law, and ought to have two different articles. Based on a very quick read of the syllabi, 363 U.S. 207 (1960) is about a jurisprudential point: whether the court of appeals erred by jumping to a constitutional issue; it should have tried to resolve the issues of the local laws themselves first, and only if the case could not have been resolved on that basis, should the court have moved on to the constitutional issue. In contrast, 377 U.S. 179 (1964) is a determination of whether the statute of limitations at issue was consistent with the due process and full faith and credit.

These are sufficiently distinct that they merit separate articles. Obviously, each article would include a reference to the other. The article on the 1960 case would have a coda that indicates that the court eventually went on to consider the constitutional issue in the 1964 case; and the article on the 1964 case would note that the parties had previously been to the Supreme Court in the 1960 case.

But each case has its independent basis of notability. I have no doubt that if either case had been the only one to get to SCOTUS, it would have merited a Wikipedia article. The only real thing they have in common is the factual background and parties. The actual reasons to have the articles at all are quite independent of one another.

My points here are limited to multiple cases before the same forum, especially the Supreme Court. Where there are multiple cases over multiple forums (e.g., a notable district court case that turns into a notable court of appeals case, which turns into a notable Supreme Court case), one article is probably usually the right way to go. TJRC (talk) 15:40, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

I have done what I have done with these; if someone else wants to split them, I certainly won't fight that. However, as a resolution of a set of facts, this just as easily be seen as one case that went through various bumps to get to its end. BD2412 T 21:09, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't think there's a need to split a case like this. Another good example where there is no need to make a separate case page is Florida v. Georgia (2018), where the 2021 case was basically mostly an "office-type action" to conclude the matter. If there was ever a situation, however, where one case of a paired/multiple visits to SCOTUS where only one case was deemed to be landmark or of significant merit, while the other cases were not trivial but did not have the same impact, then splitting would make sense, like if there was the main "Roe v. Wade" decision and some followup "Roe II" that was more procedural. --Masem (t) 21:45, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't suggest that what BD2412 did was wrong; it's an improvement over what was before. I do think it would be better as two articles, but that would require someone with the interest/expertise required to unravel them, and that's not me. In the absence of that, one article is fine.

With respect to Florida v. Georgia (2018): when I wrote my comment above, I had in mind only appellate-jurisdiction cases, not original-jurisdiction vases like Florida v. Georgia. I agree that what I was suggesting above wouldn't be at all applicable there. That's one long case all in the Supreme Court (despite it having been delegated to a special master).

And I should also emphasize my weasling "nearly always two different cases enunciating two different holdings of law"; on those occasions where it's really the same issue (say, SCOTUS remands to the court of appeals to "reconsider", the court of appeals rules the same way, and SCOTUS reverses a second time, this time with a bigger font and more exclamation points), I would see no value in separate articles.

To put meat on this: we have Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013), a case on whether importation of copies lawfully made outside the US is infringement of US copyright. On my to-do list is to write up an article on Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., , 569 U.S. ___ (2016) (Kirtsaeng II), on the denial of attorney's fees to a prevailing copyright defendant. To me, the two Kirtsaeng cases are quite distinct and should have separate articles. Other than the parties, Kirtsaeng II has more in common with Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. than with the 2013 Kirtsaeng case. TJRC (talk) 23:01, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

I hate to be the one to make this pun, but I think that means we need to take this on a case by case basis. BD2412 T 03:06, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Carter v. United States

I wrote a draft for Carter v. United States SCOTUS case but it was rejected for lack of sources. Only secondary sources I found mention the case in passing in footnotes, mostly because this case wasn't really stating a new principle but just reaffirmed Schmuck v. United States. The Schmuck article has a section for Carter, so I could just move the most relevant stuff there, I just saw a red link and figured every SCOTUS case deserved its own page. Here is the draft: Draft:Carter v. United States — Preceding unsigned comment added by Smerdyakov911 (talk • contribs) 12:47, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Becker v. Montgomery

I am trying to write one missing Supreme Court case article a day. Today is Draft:Becker v. Montgomery. How do you get the fancy box on the side of the article, the one with the SCOTUS seal on it? Thanks. Smerdyakov911 (talk) 23:37, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Smerdyakov911: That's called an infobox; it can be sort of tricky. The one we use for SCOTUS cases is available here. If you copy all of the syntax below "commonly needed" (the part with litigants, arguedate, argueyear, etc.) into the article and fill it out, it should give you what you're looking for. (The formatting can be rather persnickety. There's some documentation on the page I linked, and feel free to ask here if you run into trouble.) You don't have to fill out every single field, and some of them may not be applicable at all. You might also find this guide to infoboxes helpful, although it doesn't discuss the specific Supreme Court infobox we use. Thanks for working on writing Supreme Court case articles! It always surprises me how many important decisions are still missing. Cheers, Extraordinary Writ (talk) 23:57, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Extraordinary Writ: Thanks I will try that! Smerdyakov911 (talk) 12:32, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

Brown v. Hotel and Restaurant Employees

Brown v. Hotel and Restaurant Employees is being reassessed. See Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Brown v. Hotel and Restaurant Employees/1. ANy help fixing issues will be appreciated Aircorn (talk) 16:15, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Project Assessment Guide

I am new to the WikiProject so I might not see it but I was wondering if there was a Assessment guide (since that is what I mainly do for WikiProjects) so I can help with the importance assessment backlog (which is currently at 1,013 articles). For reference, I think WikiProject Economics has a good guide and I know a few other projects do too. If there isn't one, maybe this can be added as part of the plan section. I would be willing to work on it so please let me know! (I'll watch the page so just respond here) - Karthanitesh (talk) 04:29, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Karthanitesh, I don't think we have any particular guidance on that: we're not too big of a WikiProject. The guidance at Wikipedia:Assessing articles#Importance ratings: a variety of definitions is good general advice, and looking through Category:U.S. Supreme Court articles by importance will give you a pretty good idea of how we usually do it. I would say that, generally, "top" would be cases fundamental to the American system of government (e.g. Marbury v. Madison, Brown v. Board of Education), "high" would be the leading cases in the relevant area of law (e.g. District of Columbia v. Heller, Ex parte Young), "mid" would be cases that had an impact on the law but aren't generally treated as landmarks (e.g. Kleindienst v. Mandel, Hollingsworth v. Perry), and "low" is everything else (something like 85% of cases). Feel free to ask here or on my talk page if you have any questions, but don't worry about it too much: our ratings are not particularly consistent with one another, and the difference between the classes makes no real difference in the grand scheme of things. Oh, and welcome to the WikiProject: there's plenty of work that needs to be done! Extraordinary Writ (talk) 05:09, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Extraordinary Writ, that makes a lot of sense! I'll definitely try to help out with writing the articles eventually but just wanted to get my feet wet with some assessments so I appreciate the summary of the categories. If I have any questions, I'll ask on your talk page when it arises.- Karthanitesh (talk) 16:20, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

United States v. Felix

Hi, I am a very new editor, and I recently have improved on the United States v. Felix stub article. Was wondering if anyone would want to take a look at it, improve it, provide feedback. Also wondering if there is enough in there to change the status of the article. Not exactly sure what that process would look like Amicuswiki07 (talk) 05:51, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Adarand v. Pena

I was wondering if someone could help me review Adarand v. Pena. The background and info section (which would I assume means the fact section) in the article has no citations and mis-edited block quote. I assume they just briefed the fact section from the actual opinion but I was under the impression that primary resources is not preferred on wikipedia. I do run into this issue with stub Supreme Court cases because not many law review articles are written on cases that don't already have notoriety. So the only place to draw from is the original published article itself from lexisnexis or westlaw. I am still learning the wikipedia way so I was not sure what the appropriate way to handle this. I would rewrite the whole thing but it is decent work and didn't want to remove it unless its necessary. Amicuswiki07 (talk) 03:15, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi Amicuswiki07. This is pretty common – many of our SCOTUS articles were written by people who didn't have the time/knowledge/resources to consult law review articles and other scholarly sources, so they just summarized the opinion as best they could. That's definitely not ideal: as you say, primary sources are discouraged, and relying heavily on them often leads to mistakes and misunderstandings. If you can find secondary sources to support what the article is saying, feel free to just add them in; if you can't, it might be best to start afresh. One of my favorite resources is this book by Paul Finkelman and Melvin I. Urofsky. It gives brief summaries (generally a few paragraphs each) for over 1000 Supreme Court cases, including Adarand. Best of all, you can read it for free – all you need is an account with the Internet Archive. Law review articles are very useful as well; there are quite a lot about Adarand, many of which are can be seen on Google Scholar. Many of us have access to some of the paywalled databases (e.g. HeinOnline and JSTOR), so go ahead and ask if there are any articles you need! Feel free to let me know if you have any more questions, and thanks for your work: as you're probably seeing, there are a lot of articles that need help. Cheers, Extraordinary Writ (talk) 04:18, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi Extraordinary Writ. Thank you for the feedback and help, that makes more sense now. I will definitely check out that book and see how I can work on fixing the Adarand article's factual summary. I also do see there are quite a lot of SCOTUS articles that are stubs, I do read a lot of Supreme Court cases on my own so I am always double checking to see if I can work/fix the wiki article on those cases. If you don't mind, may I ping you on the talk page of the article when I am done? Amicuswiki07 (talk) 22:05, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Sure, Amicuswiki07, feel free to ping me whenever you like – I'm glad to be of assistance. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 22:17, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Help interpreting Chisholm v. Georgia Decision

I've been working on Chisholm v. Georgia for a bit right now and I am having troubling interpreting how the opinion is organized. I understand that on (section? paragraph? line?) 34, this begins Iredell's dissent since that's how the page currently refers to it but I am confused about what was all that writing prior to Iredell's dissent. Is that a joint majority opinion? I thought it was Jay's opinion until I realize his name is mentioned later. It looks to be written by Robert Forsyth, a Marshal for the State of Georgia but I'm not sure how to incorporate this for the wiki page.

Any help would be greatly appreciated since I don't have a law background but I have decided to make this page better! - Karthanitesh (talk) 03:51, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:SCOTUSterms

Template:SCOTUSterms has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Nigej (talk) 12:01, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:SCOTUS term for US volume

Template:SCOTUS term for US volume has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Nigej (talk) 12:01, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Navigation templates for court case subjects? Why?

Recently, someone was BOLD and made a huge template to slap on every single case article dealing with Article I of the Constitution. It's at {{USArticleI}}, and I'll be honest. I don't like this. I didn't even like when someone added this feature to the {{USCopyrightActs}} template, but I didn't push back when that happened because it was "just" a relatively small (but still huge) selection of the copyright cases. This time, I asked the person behind {{USArticleI}} what the motivation and scope behind this was on the talk page. I don't think the answer is compelling enough to justify a policy of creating and maintaining what will one day be many templates that are THIS HUGE separately from categories. I'm wracking my brain over here and I can't think of what this does that categories don't do, and categories don't become obsolete every time a new decision comes down related to extremely broad subjects. You're free to disagree, of course. Nonetheless, I think the fact that this concept has sprung up twice in a relatively short amount of time is worth a discussion among us. Do we want to do navigation boxes for court cases? If so, why? lethargilistic (talk) 21:25, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

Lethargilistic, I think you're exactly right. WP:NAVBOX, which is a guideline, has five helpful criteria to assess such things. I would suggest that this navbox doesn't meet those criteria. The subject is far from "single [and] coherent", the articles generally do not "refer to each other", and no editor "would be inclined to link many of these articles in the See Also sections of the articles." Since the navbox doesn't meet these criteria and are instead consists of "loosely related" topics, the policy suggests using "a list, category, or neither." It certainly may be useful to have a navbox on narrower topics like free speech or citizenship law. But this category is so broad as to be useless. (An article about, e.g., copyright law has no reason to link to an article about, e.g., habeas corpus, the census, or Congressional immunity. If this is permitted, the next steps will be "Supreme Court cases involving the Constitution", "Supreme Court cases", "court cases", and so on, ad infinitum.) If this went to TfD, I'd consider !voting for deletion. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 22:03, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

That said, individual templates for the individual clauses (probably better shown at {{US1stAmendment}} (but which has the same issue) makes sense - eg a template that links all case law that deals with the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment would make sense.

Now, that said, to complement these, we certainly can provide list articles (or if they are too small, sections in the relevant law/constitutional language) that document the key landmark/merit cases, and provide a navbox template that connects those lists, as that would absolutely be related per NAVBOX (eg if I'm on the page about cases on the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment, links to the other lists for the other case laws related to the other clauses in the 1st would be reasonable, as well as to a possible master list/outline for at least the Constitution + amendments as a larger navigation aspect. --Masem (t) 22:16, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

Honestly, I don't think navboxes make sense in this context for any topics. They will always be out of date. They will always tend to grow large; if not today, then tomorrow. Do we include lower-court decisions and balloon them even further, as in {{USCopyrightActs}}? I do think lists make sense in some cases. We already provide at least some case law lists by topic. There are some more specifically about SCOTUS case law. One of my pet projects is the List of United States Supreme Court copyright case law. But a navbox at the bottom of every case? The labor of creating and maintaining such a thing is daunting, and the result is very public. The copyright case law list is at least something that I can do quietly for fun. lethargilistic (talk) 22:28, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

Maybe we can do something like this: There could be a master list like List of United States Supreme court cases by topic. That is going to be a list of lists, pointing to both existing lists and new ones that could be created from the existing templates that mimic List of United States Supreme Court cases involving the First Amendment's layout (with the only change/amendment that I would add would be to briefly include the importance of each case as to make these lists more useful than just categories). I would expect a list for each Article and Amendment in the Constitution if there has been a reasonably body of case law for it. We can also have a section for other high-level topic areas like those in that category (eg copyright, immigration rights, and I'm sure there's more groups at the high level we're missing). A specific SCOTUS case then should have a "See also" to the appropriate list(s). In that fashion, the only navigation template then would be on the list pages, one template to mimick the list of lists. --Masem (t) 00:17, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

I did not realize there is a category of US conlaw navboxes. I may be on the extreme end of the spectrum here, but I would support deleting essentially all of these. They all exhibit the same problems and deserve some WP:NAVBOX scrutiny, IMO. Are they better as lists, and do those lists already exist? lethargilistic (talk) 22:42, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

In my opinion, most of these don't pose the same issues. They all relate to a distinct concept, and the linked articles are pretty closely related to one another. The Article I template, however, goes well beyond that, connecting unrelated articles simply because they're all connected to the exercise of Congressional power. (The Article III template, which is also new, suffers from some of the same problems, although somewhat less acutely.) More focused navboxes are fine by me, but this one is just a bridge too far. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 22:51, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't think they do relate to distinct concepts, really. The Article ones are extreme cases, we agree, but the amendment templates are also massive. The way these break down into huge lists of subtopics before we even list the cases undermines the idea that these things are distinct.

Among the amendments, the worst offender is predictably {{US1stAmendment}}. The "Freedom of speech" section is so bad that it links out to the freedom of speech portal before you even open it. Once you do, you're bombarded with subsection-upon-massive-subsection about different kinds of unprotected speech. Under that, it switches to "Strict scrutiny". Then it's "Vagueness", "Symbolic speech versus conduct", and "Content-based restrictions" before more subcategories regarding "Content-neutral restrictions". And that's not even half of that top-level subsection. Is even this one subsection really one distinct subject at that point, even if these cases all broadly fall under Freedom of speech, which is broadly regarded by the First Amendment? How do we distinguish that from the way {{USArticleI}} considers so many cases vaguely connected to exercises of congressional power? Should we have to do this kind of analysis for the other six top-level subsections, even if some of those don't require sub-subsections?

The {{US8thAmendment}} may be a more favorable example, but I think it's a stretch. It's separated into two main branches, "Cruel and unusual punishment" and "Excessive bail and fines", which strike me as very different. I could see the argument that both sides are a kind of "punishment," generally. Underneath both of those headings, it's further broken up between different kinds of punishment on the one hand and different kinds of excessive monetary punishment. But what does the case law of physical punishment have to do with the case law of monetary punishment from the perspective of a navbox? Further, I think the subtopics of, say, execution and imprisonment are certainly related even outside of the context of the 8th Amendment, but are they really the same distinct concept? Do cases implicating monetary punishments commonly regard cases about physical punishments, and vice versa? (I honestly don't know. I'm open to a "yes.")

Even {{StudentsConstitutionalRights}} immediately branches from talking about student rights to three broadly different kinds of student rights. It's a smaller area of the law, so the template itself is smaller, but it presents the same issues. It has the potential to grow large over time, too. More slowly, perhaps. However, doesn't that just emphasize how quickly the worst offenders, like {{US1stAmendment}}, can grow? And because student rights is a smaller area of the law, doesn't that mean the template is less visible and therefore less likely to be updated?

Like, have we really been maintaining these templates this whole time, separately and autonomously, without thinking about their maintenance requirements or scope? I checked the {{US1stAmendment}} talk page and it seems like this hasn't even been discussed there. That seems very strange to me. lethargilistic (talk) 23:30, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

@Lethargilistic, Extraordinary Writ, and Masem: Sincerest apologies for a horribly and inexcusably belated response to everything that's been said since I am the contributor who created the Article I and Article III navboxes and created them at least partially to force this discussion after observing the First Amendment navbox. While I readily concede that they are too long, I do believe that there is a need and a value to linking U.S. Supreme Court cases that satisfy WP:Notability guidelines given the decline in the public discourse in the United States over the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation process as well as other areas of public policy related to U.S. constitutional law.

I must confess that despite being a U.S. citizen, I know decidedly little about many of these cases and would love to be able to follow more of the news and commentary about the Supreme Court but always feel like I know too little of the case law to be able to fully appreciate it. I also think that the quality of the news and commentary that the public receives would improve if reporters and commentators could more easily navigate Wikipedia when fact-checking and doing background research for their articles (as I'm sure many of them already do). I would also argue that ignorance among the public about Article I case law in particular is responsible for much of the popularity of Ron Paul and Rand Paul (specifically the Legal Tender Cases and Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States), as well as perhaps some of the current opposition to the new OSHA rule requiring vaccinations of employees in companies with more than 100 employees for at least the companies that are engaged in interstate commerce.

I agree that having navboxes for whole Articles or Amendments to the U.S. Constitution is too broad, but I think for individual sections of the Articles or Amendments and for individual clauses that there still is a value to grouping them so that when they come up in the news, any citizen can understand the news and commentary about U.S. constitutional law that they receive better. If navboxes for individual clauses get too long, which some might, those can always be further separated by the tenures of the different Chief Justices. Also, I think that if they are split up, it actually might be easier to maintain them because obviously case law before the Roberts Court is not changing anymore and all anyone needs to do is catalogue new cases after articles for them are created. I would also say that I do not know if every Supreme Court case is notable enough for having a Wikipedia article. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:35, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

@Lethargilistic, Extraordinary Writ, and Masem: Also, if it saves the time of clerks for judges on the federal bench, legislative aides in Congress and state legislatures, and the legal departments of various agencies in the federal government (particularly those tasked with enforcing antitrust laws), then that would also be a positive externality of keeping the navboxes and splitting them up. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 14:48, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

What's probably better a better way to approach this is suggested above: let's start with pages if not already sections on the specific constitution clauses of key SCOTUS and circuit rulings that that clause falls under with at least a brief statement to what the relevance is of that case in how extends or bounds the the Constitutional rights. Then it makes sense to have a template that works alongside side that, narrowed to one aspect of it, and which possibly can include other factors, not just court cases. Remember that to most lay people, the names of these cases are nonsense and only a few have clear known impact (eg Roe v. Wade), so the navbox doesn't help a lot but having a landing page as a starting point to go along with that would. --Masem (t) 18:41, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

I feel like this issue got a bit derailed by my desire for broader cuts, which was not a path to consensus. But most of us seemed to agree that navboxes aren't the solution we should go with by default. I think Masem's idea that we start with pages is a good one. There are already fairly developed examples of that, such as List of United States Supreme Court copyright case law, which represents Article I Section 8. I also suspect that navigation between these related pages would be better suited by a sidebar navigation akin to {{Donald_Trump_series}} than a collapsed navigation bar at the bottom that just links out to every single case. Also, yeah, most people will not be able to make heads or tails of a list of case names and Wikipedia is not just for judges and clerks. Thoughts? lethargilistic (talk) 01:26, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

User script to detect unreliable sources

Main page: User:Headbomb/unreliable

I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. Some of you may already be familiar with it, given it is currently the 39th most imported script on Wikipedia. The idea is that it takes something like

• John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14. (John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.)

and turns it into something like

• John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14.

It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}} and {{doi}}.

The script is mostly based on WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:NPPSG and WP:CITEWATCH and a good dose of common sense. I'm always expanding coverage and tweaking the script's logic, so general feedback and suggestions to expand coverage to other unreliable sources are always welcomed.

Do note that this is not a script to be mindlessly used, and several caveats apply. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable.

- Headbomb {t · c · p · b}

This is a one time notice and can't be unsubscribed from. Delivered by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:02, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Supreme Court of the United States in fiction

This may be a fun little diversion from the usual case context. Recently there has been a trend of gutting and deleting Wikipedia articles on popular culture topics, in some cases frankly reflecting very poor writing and sourcing of these topics. Getting ahead of this curve, I have deleted all unsourced or undersourced content from Supreme Court of the United States in fiction. This leaves the article rather sparse, so I am hoping that editors from this project might have their fingers on the pulse of sources addressing fictional depictions of the court, ranging from the entirely contrived and over the top to the strikingly accurate. Cheers! BD2412 T 22:58, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

NetChoice

Hi, I recently created NetChoice & I think it's a notable Supreme Court defendant. But the notability police showed up quick. Hope someone here can help beef up the article. thanks, brah what up (talk) 17:53, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Redirecting companion cases

I have begun redirect companion cases to their resolving case where a one-line per curiam opinion referencing the outcome of the resolving case. I wanted to make sure that this project is on board with that before I get too much deeper into so doing. An example (or, actually, three examples) would be the "Aftermath" section that I have added at Chambers v. Maroney. BD2412 T 05:03, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

GAR notice

Brown v. Board of Education has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke (talk) 03:08, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

United States v. Alvarez

United States v. Alvarez is designated a good article, and has one paragraph that's kind of a mess: third paragraph, about en banc review, in section "'Alvarez's statements". It refers to a "Judge Smith," without identifying which of the two Judges Smith it refers to, and appears to mix them freely despite each being on the opposite side from the other; it includes a quote that appears nowhere in any opinion; it cites to a concurring opinion as a dissent; and a few other things. I opened a discussion about a week ago on the talk page giving further detail. Anyone want to take a crack at this? Otherwise I'll just delete the paragraph; the article stands well without it, and the paragraph is at best confusing and at worst misinformative. TJRC (talk) 19:59, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Schenck v. United States question

Your input is requested in the thread Talk:Schenck v. United States#Garbled account of Baltzer. Cheers! --Thinker78 (talk) 22:24, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

Perez v. Sturgis Public Schools

Your input is requested in the thread This is an article in the news about the court expanding the rights of children with disabilities. I made it and user placed it in drafts. Could use help adding more reference and any admin moving it out of drafts. Please and thank you.Draft:Luna Perez v. Sturgis Public Schools. Thank you-- Jsgoodrich (talk) 08:51, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.

No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.

However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 21:49, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Draft:List of boundary cases of the United States Supreme Court

I have started Draft:List of boundary cases of the United States Supreme Court (from material previously organized for an article on one such case). Individual boundary cases tend to say very little, and are of doubtful notability, but I think a single comprehensive list of such cases would be quite interesting. BD2412 T 04:07, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Note: Now moved to List of boundary cases of the United States Supreme Court. BD2412 T 19:56, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Slip opinions and preliminary prints

I have a couple small changes in mind about how we link to opinions, which I welcome comments on:

• In pending cases, I see we often have placeholders for not yet released opinions, like "Justia Oyez (oral argument audio) [ Supreme Court (slip opinion)] [ Supreme Court (preliminary print)]" (e.g. Special:Diff/1158363538 by User:JocularJellyfish). I think it would be preferable not to add this text preemptively, which can be confusing. The Justia link in particular is invariably a dead link. I would rather we just wait until the opinions are actually available. (And I trust we'll update pages expeditiously then.)
• Once the preliminary print is released, it seems a little excessive to include external links to both the slip opinion and preliminary print. I would remove the slip opinion link at that point. Between the two, the preliminary print is closer to what's going to be final/official, and can have some (usually very minor) revisions. (The counterargument might be that the gray background text "Page Proof Pending Publication" is annoying to read.)

Adumbrativus (talk) 02:18, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Regarding the first point, I am not opposed to commenting Template:caselaw source out, so it can be quickly unhidden when the case is decided. Adding the Oyez link when cert is granted might be worth it, however, as the case page on that website is created almost immediately after cert is granted. Regarding the second, my view is that keeping both links is appropriate, both because the slip opinion avoids the watermark, and because the Supreme Court is making it difficult to find the slip opinion links after the preliminary print is added. However, retaining the link on the Wikipedia page for each case allows readers to access the slip opinion, where it might otherwise be impossible to locate the link. – JocularJellyfish ^Talk_Contribs 02:25, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments! That all sounds pretty reasonable to me. Adumbrativus (talk) 02:40, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Old slip opinion deadlinks

What should be done with the deadlinks to slip opinion that have been deleted from SupremeCourt.gov? Currently, this includes opinions from 2015 and earlier, such as this.

• We could find archive versions from the Internet Archive, but that is not done authomatically within the {{Caselaw source}} template.
• It would be much easier to just remove them (as with Special:Diff/1168645679), or to comment them out (as with Special:Diff/1168647876).

I am inclined toward the latter options. SilverLocust 💬 03:58, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

• All old case opinions are still available through that website, at [1]. Mind you, they generate 1000+ pg PDFs, so you have to add a #page to the URL (the page # in the PDF, not the normally cited page number). Eg, randomly picked, Lockhart v. United States (2016) is at [2]. --Masem (t) 04:14, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

I would think those are separate issues (i.e., whether to link the final U.S. Reports and whether to remove the old slip opinions). Also, let me revise what I am suggesting. These could both be implemented very easily:

• We could archive the slip opinion deadlinks with Internet Archive (as with Special:Diff/1168650274).
• We could remove the slip opinion deadlinks (as with Special:Diff/1168645679).

(Also, I am just referring to removing the links in the "external links" {{Caselaw source}} section, not in any references that for whatever reason link to the slip opinion.) SilverLocust 💬 04:34, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

I think I'll just switch the deadlinks to archived links for now, if there is no objection to that. SilverLocust 💬 04:54, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

I think we definitely should be including a link to the U.S. Reports bound volume PDF, with the #page in the manner that Masem suggests. (That is, for everything not old enough to be included in the Library of Congress collection [3] with its friendlier non-1000 page PDFs.) It's formally what's published, can contain minor revisions, and has the page numbering that people will cite. But yes this is a separate issue. Adumbrativus (talk) 05:43, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Draft:Berkovitz v. United States‎

I have started a draft at Draft:Berkovitz v. United States‎, a rather important case involving the liability of a government agency when it screws up a non-discretionary function. Cheers! BD2412 T 17:41, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Inconsistency in Younger v. Harris

I noted at Talk:Younger v. Harris#Two different lists of three exceptions that the article seems to be inconsistent and provides two different lists of exceptions; it would be great if an expert could take a look. Joriki (talk) 19:47, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

@Joriki: I believe the first list is what was set forth in the case, and the second list is what was eventually refined by the courts to be the doctrine emanating from the case. BD2412 T 17:42, 22 September 2023 (UTC)