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I was noticing the other day that the Internet Archive has scanned a lot of volumes of the Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court in the last year or two. These are very comprehensive (to a fault...) sources, and many of them are difficult to find online because of errors in the metadata, so I figured I'd list what's available here in case anyone finds it useful:
The style guide currently recommends "Opinion of the Court" as a section title (or one of two possible section titles). This strikes me as somewhat crosswise of MOS:HEAD, especially the familiar injunction to [n]ot redundantly refer back to the subject of the article. Given that articles covered by this style guide are specifically about Supreme Court proceedings, is there any reason not to shorten this header to "Opinion"? -- Visviva (talk) 04:25, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Opinion" would cause confusion when there are also dissenting, concurring, etc. opinions. But "majority opinion" works, as would "decision" in some cases (I've used both before). At any rate, that style guide mainly reflects one or two editors' opinions, so while it contains some useful advice, feel free to just do whatever makes the most sense to you in any given instance. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 04:37, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This depends upon how we decide to balance correctness against brevity. "Opinion of the Court" may be clunky, but it is the technically correct term. A majority opinion is the official opinion of the court, not just of the judges in the majority. White Whirlwind 14:47, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Jacobson v. United States has been nominated for a 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. Z1720 (talk) 19:08, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Cases lacking articles
Hello, I am new to this Wikiproject; does it have a designated list/area for cases that lack an article? The closest I could find was "articles for creation" under "article alerts", but that seems to be for drafts submitted for creation/review. If there is not, I think it would be useful to create one, so people wishing to create case articles can organize their efforts and easily find cases in need of one. Thank you, and please direct me to the proper location if this question is misplaced. Mason7512 (talk) 19:17, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Mason7512: I have been making a lot of missing case articles lately. I have just been using the volumes pages like List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 586, creating the articles with {{SCOTUS-case}} and {{SCOTUS-case-talk}}. For volume 552 and later, you can pretty reliably use SCOTUSblog as a basis for a holding summary, or preferably just quote the opinion's syllabus and include {{USGovernment-courts}}. I take the view that all of them with an opinion are notable in the sense that some kind of reliable secondary source describes every single one of them, although for practical reasons I have used redirects for relatively rare edge cases. For example, evenly-split affirmances where the underlying case was not well-known; the case might be notable, but figuring that out would require a lot more research than I am willing to do. See my contributions for examples, I guess. If there's any more interest in centralizing the process, I could export my sandbox shortcuts into a subpage of the WikiProject. lethargilistic (talk) 19:10, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure I would go so far as to say that all Supreme Court cases are notable. Especially with older cases, it can be hard to find effective coverage. For example, I wrote about Townsend v. Sain (1963), but I think that was pushing the limits of notability. I had to really scour the web and that was the extent of what I could find. CaptainEekEdits Ho Cap'n!⚓22:35, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As long as there are potentially 3 reliable sources available upon challenge, subjective impressions about the notability of theoretical articles don't matter. Virtually all SCOTUS opinions can meet that threshold through contemporary news, casebooks, and legal scholarship alone. For instance, Townsend has over 1000 results on Google Scholar; the article only needs 3 to exist, if challenged. lethargilistic (talk) 00:46, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Brown v. Board of Education has been nominated for a 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. Z1720 (talk) 20:51, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Berghuis v. Thompkins has been nominated for a 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. Z1720 (talk) 01:29, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
J. D. B. v. North Carolina has been nominated for a 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. Z1720 (talk) 16:27, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
J.D.B. is more clearly beneath the Good Article criteria than Berghuis was, IMO, so I won't try to help it. But I think I should flag to WP:SCOTUS that the main argument other than citation issues (about which I agree) is that incorporating the actual text of the opinion into the article should count against the articles for the purpose of GA status. I disagree for the reasons expressed in the Berghuis discussion. lethargilistic (talk) 20:42, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unmarked direct quotations in holdings and questions presented
Ordinarily across Wikipedia, direct quotations are clearly identified with quotation marks, a citation, etc., as guidelines and policies such as MOS:QUOTE and verifiability suggest. On the other hand, infoboxes of Supreme Court cases routinely contain verbatim quotations of questions presented and holdings, without any explicit indicator. (I myself have done this before.) You might say that direct quotation is implied, but I think ordinary readers have no reason to know or expect this.
