Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases/old

I'd like to help standardize'''' and expand Wikipedia's collection of U.S. Supreme Court cases and U.S. Supreme Court Justices.

I'm thinking that each case page should contain the following headings: .

• Introduction and Overview. and brief description highlighting the impact of the case on American judicial history and jurisprudence.
• Members of the Court, and which of the opinions in the case they wrote and/or joined.
• Facts of the case. A brief background of the facts, only so much as is necessary to understand the case (or more, if particularly interesting.)
• Legal rule for which the opinion is significant.
• Analysis. Why is the case important? What problems did this resolve (or create?) What have scholars written or said about the case?
• Odds & Ends. Whatever happened to Carrie Buck, for instance.
• External links to the text of the case at Findlaw, Cornell LII, etc.

The page for each Justice should contain:

• Introduction and Overview including birth/death years, years served on the Court, and other stub-like features.
• Biography.
• Analysis of the Justice's impact on the court.
• Notable decisions.
• Fun facts.

Too much electronic law related information is behind closed doors on paid services - Westlaw and Lexis. This could be a valuable resource for students and laypeople. Please post below if you are interested in joining me.

--PrinceValium 04:27, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Standardizing titles

Should we use vs. or v.; examples see below

vs

• The People vs. Larry Flynt
• Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee

v

• Feist v. Rural
• Marbury v. Madison
• Adair v. United States
• Schenck v. United States
• NAACP v. Alabama
• United States v. Shabani
• Lawrence v. Texas
• Korematsu v. United States
• Abington School District v. Schempp
• Consolidated Edison Co. v. Public Serv. Comm'n
• Engel v. Vitale
• FCC v. Pacifica Foundation
• United States v. Nixon
• United States v. Morrison
• Worcester v. Georgia
• ... see [1]

---

The correct format is "v." A proper citation looks like this: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

The elements of the citation are: (1) Name of case, in italics; (2) comma (not italicized,) (3) volume number, (4) identifier of the reporter (U.S. stands for United States Reports), (5) page that the case begins on in the reporter, (6) year in parentheses.

Lower court cases use different citation formats. A Ninth Circuit case looks like this: Newdow v. United States Congress, 292 F.3d 597 (9th Cir. 2002). Note that the court identifier precedes the date, because the reporter F.3d (Federal Reporter, Third Edition) contains cases from other circuit courts as well while the United States Reports contains only Supreme Court cases.

A state supreme court case should be cited using a regional reporter as follows: Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, 798 N.E.2d 941 (Mass. 2003). The reporter here is West's Northeast Reports, Second Edition, and note the identifier "Mass." as Massachusetts' highest court.

There wouldn't be a problem with wikifying anything in the citation, as long as the punctuation and italicizing remains correct.

The authority on citation formats is The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, published by the Harvard Law Review Association. It's widely used and respected in law schools, courts, and private practice, and I would strongly encourage that we use it here.

--PrinceValium 11:53, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Lower Court History

I should add "Lower Court History" as one of the topics above. This should be brief, however, especially for older cases.

More

The following pages are done extremely well and would serve as a good example of "analysis" - NPOV explanation of the legal, social, and cultural impact of the case.

• Plessy v. Ferguson
• Lawrence v. Texas

However, these are few and far between, and they would all benefit from standardized section headings. --PrinceValium 12:14, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)