Talk:Article One of the United States Constitution/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Reywas92 ^Talk 19:26, 2 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You've done a great job so far improving the article! Here are some comments on improvement.

Prose/MOS

It's generally not called the Congress
Well, in theory Wikipedia doesn't dictate anything, but we have the WP:MOS to provide guidance and to have consistency. You have no idea what you're talking about. You wouldn't say "Congress power," you pronounce it "Congresses power". Since the apostrophe only indicates possession but does not have any pronunciation "Congress' power" sounds completely wrong. You need that extra s to get the correct pronunciation: "Congress's power."

Broadness

Neutral

Yes

Stable

Yes

Images

More to come. Reywas92 ^Talk 19:26, 2 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note: I've tagged the article at WP:GAN as being reviewed by you, and removed it from the backlog at the top of the page. Upon completion, you can update it here—DMCer™ 19:54, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

User:Hamiltonstone or any other willing user has my persmission to take over this review and close it when ready. Reywas92^Talk 22:43, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

New reviewer

I am going to take over the review here, thanks to Reywas for getting things started. This article is by far the best of the seven on the articles of the US Constitution. It covers all clauses and appears comprehensive in that sense. However the article has some serious issues that would need to be addressed:

Significant progress has been made, in comparison to the other articles on Articles, with referencing, but it has a long long way to go. There are entire paragraphs - and in some cases whole subsections (eg. on Section 7 clause 2; and Section 9) where there are no references at all.
Referencing court cases. There is a tendency in law articles on WP to reference court cases as citations to support particular anaylses in the article. This is a problem across WP articles in this area. An explanation of the issue is below.
The lead is a poor summary of the article.
There is no introduction to the Article as a whole, no history and no context. This is necessary for it to read like an encyclopedia article rather than a law textbook article.
There is no scholarly analysis of the effect of the Article as a whole.

These are the main issues. If more specific points are worth raising, i may make a separate list of them. Regards, hamiltonstone (talk) 23:23, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Citing case law in articles about laws

There is a problem across a large number of WP pages that relate to legal topics, in particular which involve case law.

At the heart of the problem is this: judgments of cases are themselves primary sources. As such, they should not in general be relied upon as sources in WP entries. To quote from the verifiability policy:
Primary sources are sources very close to an event. For example, an account of a traffic accident written by a witness is a primary source of information about the accident. Other examples include archeological artifacts; photographs; historical documents such as diaries, census results, video or transcripts of surveillance, public hearings, trials, or interviews;...(emphasis added)
WP does not say these sources cannot be used at all. The policy recommends:
Primary sources that have been reliably published (for example, by a university press or mainstream newspaper) may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. Without a secondary source, a primary source may be used only to make descriptive claims, the accuracy of which is verifiable by a reasonable, educated person without specialist knowledge.
The appropriate way in which to use case law would be:

(a) to cite cases, including Wikilinks if available, in order to inform the reader of the cases, dates etc at which certain legal events took place;

(b) to cite or quote judgments to the extent that the article is describing what the judges said; BUT

(c) to cite other sources, that are not the judgments themselves, in describing the effects those judgments have.

Here is an example that used to be in Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (the article has changed somewhat since then). The article stated:

...the Supreme Court, since Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), has also interpreted the Equal Protection Clause as requiring the states to apportion their congressional districts and state legislative seats on a "one-person, one-vote" basis.

This sentence reports how two U.S. Supreme Court decisions have interpreted a clause of a constitutional amendment. This statement cannot rely on the citations of the cases themselves, which are primary sources. It is not reasonable to suggest that on the strength of two case citations, "a reasonable, educated person without specialist knowledge" could readily verify the claim made in the WP article regarding what was the effect of those judgments. The understanding of the effect of those two judgments must be based on a secondary source. As I indicated at the start of this comment, this is a problem which plagues many articles in the field of law. I encourage all the law students, law professionals, journalists and others who contribute to these articles to just pull out your case law handbooks and textbooks - it doesn't have to be anything as fancy as the Harvard Law Review - and provide secondary sources to ensure verifiability of these articles. hamiltonstone (talk) 23:19, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I tend to disagree, or at least not entirely agree. The context in which "public hearings, trials" is listed above is not really relevant to appellate interpretation of a governing piece of law (such as a Constitution). Appellate consideration of a law or constitution seems like it can in many or even most cases be a secondary source. Many appellate cases outline the historical development of a given area of legal doctrine, which is secondary to both the governing law itself as well as the actual appellate case at bar. Moreover, a good footnote, which provides a quotation from the appellate case that you're talking about, is easily verified by even a layman: they can read a quotation from the case to back up the paraphrased/summarized version in the main article text that the reference is supporting. Certainly, it is not simply enough to say "The 14th Amendment has been interpreted to require an equipopulation rule in congressional districts and legislative seats" and simply give a citation to those 2 cases. But it is a whole other ball of wax if you pull a quotation from those cases to include in your footnote that says precisely that. My sense is that, in an article about the U.S. Constitution, there is only 1 primary source: the Constitution itself. All other sources are by definition "secondary," in that they aren't the Constitution itself, and to the extent that they can be made to speak for themselves unambiguously, I do not see why that is an inadequate way of sourcing a statement. MrArticleOne (talk) 01:56, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Those are some useful points, raising interesting questions. For example, to the extent that judgements are not peer reviewed, and may not be published by anyone other than the court itself, should the judgements be regarded as reliable sources at WP, for any purpose other than reporting what the judgement says? I have some sympathy with the idea that they are secondary sources when they "outline the historical development of a given area of legal doctrine", but i cannot accept they are secondary sources when making judgement themselves. On a separate point, you refer to "a good footnote, which provides a quotation from the appellate case that you're talking about..." This is another reason to reject judgements as secondary sources at WP. All WP's legal articles would become completely unwieldy if the footnotes contained the relevant quotes. The long footnotes of this article are already a problem. It is another reason to rely on scholarly reporting of cases rather than the cases themselves, i think. hamiltonstone (talk) 02:26, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think the key distinction is that the law is a sort of artificial reality. While legal philosophers debate this back and forth, from a practical standpoint (certainly from the standpoint of an encyclopedia) the Constitution means whatever the courts say it means. I call it an artificial reality because it is the curious case of secondary sources which are definitive. Appellate cases do not make any judgments, which can only be made by the trial court. An appellate court, instead, provides a definitive secondary analysis of the primary source. The secondary sources that you discuss, it seems to me, are necessary in any discussion of open questions in the law, or disputed points, but not to simply source a sentence that paraphrases a clear and uncontroversial statement in a court case. As for the footnotes being unwieldy, I guess that does not concern me; they don't need to be "wieldy," because they're just references, and so long as they support well-written and easy-to-read prose, I guess unwieldy but complete footnotes don't bother me. MrArticleOne (talk) 03:17, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just to jump in here, this is an issue I've been contemplating for some time. I fully agree with the reviewer's perspective. In some respects, a judgment can be a secondary source (eg to set out the uncontested facts of a particular case). But to state Legal Proposition X, and cite Case Y as the source (even if the footnote explains the link between Y and X), is in my view impermissible original research. Even if the position taken by the court in Case Y is clear, how would we know it hasn't been overturned by Case Z? Only a scholar can tell us. The judgments that interpret the Constitution are just as much part of the law as the Constitution itself and are in that respect primary sources. The only sources that can validly be cited to link legal propositions with particular cases are scholarly publications that analyse the Constitution and the cases that interpret it. --Mkativerata (talk) 05:24, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Let's say I provided a citation to some old, out-of-date textbook (about any topic). No source ever verifies its own ongoing credibility; it's not like there's a sticker on the cover of that book that says "Now out of date!" You'd know when you found some other, later source, which disputed it and demonstrated the earlier source's lack of credibility. It's not like it'd happen inevitably; some degree of editorial judgment would need to be exercised ("I see this textbook we're citing to predates the development of germ theory. This later textbook refutes it."). That is no different than one case overruling an earlier case. Again, to the extent that the precise parameters (the "edges," so to speak) of the overruling, its extent and practical significance, are open questions or disputed issues, you'd want scholarly analysis, especially to show the differing perspectives on the open question. But on closed questions, I guess I just don't see the need. The only real "original research" I can see someone doing in a legal setting is some sort of study about the way courts handle cases, or some such thing, because ultimately all most "legal research" is (however "original") is only a derivative effort at interpreting/explaining something that's already been done. To the extent you provide "original" insights or theories, I can see that as being "original research," but it just seems absurd to me to say it's "original research" to say that courts have the power of judicial review and cite to Marbury with an appropriate quotation. MrArticleOne (talk) 17:47, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am failing this at GA for now. Notwithstanding the debate about references, there is a range of issues with the article and no substantive action on them at present. Regards, hamiltonstone (talk) 03:56, 11 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]