Judgepedia:Articles about state appellate judges
 |
This page is part of the intermediate appellate courts project, a Judgepedia project dedicated to articles related to intermediate appellate courts and judges.
To participate: grab a badge to place on your user page, then choose a task from the project page. As tasks are completed they can be crossed off the list. |
| Writing articles |
|---|
|
| Writing tips |
| About judges About state judicial decisions State appellate judges Federal judges Help Desk • Cheatsheet Style guidelines • Discussions |
| Community • Tool box |
Contents |
This article describes the consensus content, naming, style, categorization and template guidelines for articles about:
Content
Introduction
This gives the reader an 3-5 sentence executive summary of the judge in a crisp, encyclopedic tone. This should include the name of the position and court in which the judge currently serves, how he or she came to be in that position (election? appointment?), and how long his or her current term will be. If the judge is currently involved in an election campaign, retention campaign or some very notable public event or controversy, this should be mentioned in the article's introduction.
- The article should start with the name of the justice/judge in bold. The name should include his or her middle initial and add-ons such as "III" or "Jr."
- Example: Bill T. Edwards, Jr.
- The introduction should indicate when the judge/justice first joined the court, and how the justice/judge got there (appointed? by whom? when? elected? on a party ticket?).
- The introduction should indicate when the justice/judge's current term expires.
- Examples: "His current eight-year term expires in 2014, when he will face a retention election." or "His current ten-year term expires in 2014; if he seeks a new term, it will be through a non-partisan election."
- The introduction should note any public events or controversy that the judge/justice may be a part of.
Biography
Relevant and reliably sourced personal background information on the judge, including where and when he or she went to school, marital status, etc.
Legal career
A review of the key highlights of the judge or justice's career in the law. This would include information about law firms that employed the judge.
Notable cases
This section includes information about notable opinions the judge or justice wrote or cases he or she ruled on.
Judicial philosophy
What is known about the judge's philosophy?
Election campaigns
If the justice/judge sits in an elective position, this section should include information about the election contests in which the judge has participated.
- Years of election contests.
- Election results.
- Who did the judge run against?
- What notable events occurred during the election?
Current or recent election
If the justice is involved in a current or very recent re-election contest, there should be a section of the article called "YEAR election campaign" with more detail about the contest and a prominent link to the overview article about the election.
Some pointers:
- It is detrimental to the quality of an article to list every endorsement a judge or justice receives when running for election. Use your best judgment, but it is appropriate to list at most 5-10 of the most important endorsements, and then link to the judge's campaign website to obtain a full list of endorsements. Alternatively, it is possible to create a page called, for example, "Judge Jones endorsements" and link to this page from the main article on Judge Jones.
External links
The external links section of the article is where you place links to notable outside sources that provide significant information about the judge and are not already listed under the "references" section. These would generally include:
- A judges' personal website.
- Is there a campaign website for the judge? This should be linked in the external links section.
- Is there an article about the judge on Vote Smart? This should be linked in the external links section.
References
| Tool Box |
|---|
|
| Writing tips |
| Templates • Charts Categories • Footnotes Videos • Images Links Writing • Cheatsheet Discussions |
| Community • Portals |
The "reference" section of your article is where the footnotes appear that you have placed in the body of the text. See the quick guide to editing for information on how to create a reference section.
Additional reading
What if you've run across an article that says something important and relevant about the judge/justice but you:
- Don't have time to synopsize the gist of the resource/news article you've discovered.
- The "External links" section of the article is getting long and cluttered.
In that case, it is helpful to create an "Additional reading" section after the "References" section of the article. The "Additional reading" section is similar in appearance to the "External links" section but the links it contains tend to be more newsy. By creating such a section, or by adding links to it if there already is one, you're accomplishing two goals:
- You're adding a link that you can easily find again that is relevant to the justice/judge when you do have time to incorporate the gist of the link into the main article.
- You're adding a link that enables others to build the article up or, at least, click through to give them some additional relevant information about the judge that isn't (yet) in the main article.
Naming conventions
- Main article: Judgepedia:Naming conventions.
The title of the article should be the judge's proper name. Thus, an article about William Giovan of the Michigan Third Circuit Court isn't called "Bill Giovan" or "Judge Giovan" but instead is William Giovan.
Some judges are referred to with their middle initial or with a "Jr." or "Sr.". In this case, the title of the article should generally not include the middle initial or any other prefixes or suffixes. These can and should, however, appear in the first sentence of the article. In the infrequent cases where judges share a first and last name, middle initials should be used to distinguish between the two.
If you are wondering whether an article on Judgepedia already exists about the judge you plan to write about, the best way to look using the Judgepedia search box is to enter just the judge or justice's last name. That increases the odds that you will find any relevant articles before you possibly re-create the wheel.
Style guidelines
Some relevant style guidelines:
Subsections
- Subsection titles should not capitalize words after the first word, unless the subsequent words are proper nouns. For example, it should be "External links", not "External links".
- If there is a "See also" section, it should be "See also" (not "See Also") and it generally should not include JP articles that are already wiki-linked earlier in the article. The "See also" section would, for example, generally not include links like these...
...since you will normally already have linked to these articles earlier on the page and, in the case of articles about state supreme court justices, these links are already amply evident in the vertical template in the upper-right of the page.
Links that might be useful to include in a "See also" section are links to articles about judicial elections in that state, or articles that are relevant to better understanding the article but that you haven't had occasion to mention in the body of the article.
Positioning subsections
- The "references" section should come after (not before) the "external links" section.
Table of contents
- The Table of Contents (TOC) should generally appear on the right of the page. The template {{TOCnestright}} is a quick way to place the TOC on the right.
Templates
- The template for the state's supreme court should be inserted to the right of the TOC. This is accomplished by having the first editing commands of the article look like this: {{Kansas Supreme Court}}{{TOCnestright}}
- Templates for specific state supreme courts are located here:
| |||||||
Citation guidelines
- If one reference source is repeated more than once in the same article, subsequent uses of it should be handled in the manner described in multiple citations of the same reference or footnote.
Biographies
- If there is an official biography of the judge/justice on the supreme court's website or elsewhere, this citation should be included as an external link...not as a reference footnote.
- Official biographies in external links should be described as "Biography of Mary Jones", not as "Jones bio", and the source of the biography should be described, so readers know the origin, reliability and relevance of the link before clicking on it. Here's an example:
- Biography of Ronald Castille, provided by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
Categorization norms
The rule of thumb for categories is never to use capitol letters, other than for proper names. The reason for this is that [[category:Nevada Supreme Court]] and [[category:Nevada supreme court]] do not lead to the same page. Keeping all words in lowercase helps eliminate duplication of effort. Note that the first word of a category will appear as capitalized regardless of how it is typed.
The standard format for categorizing an article about a state supreme court justice is:
Etc.
Note: You should not also put the article in the category: Category:Utah or Category:Utah Supreme Court because the category, Category:Justices of the New Mexico Supreme Court is already a subcategory of Category:Utah Supreme Court.
More broadly speaking, don't put an article in a category that is a parent category of one of the categories that the article is in.
Templates
A series of templates are being created for state appellate courts. Graphically speaking, there are "vertical templates" and "horizontal navigational templates".
The vertical templates for the state supreme courts are collected here:
| |||||||
| |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Current |
Christine Durham • Matthew Durrant • Jill Parrish • Ronald Nehring • Thomas Rex Lee • | ||
| Former | Michael Wilkins • | ||
See:
- Horizontal navigational templates to figure out whether some relevant horizontal navigational templates already exist for the article you're working on.
- If you create a horizontal template, please add it to this article and to the main index page for the state to increase the odds that someone else working on the same area in Judgepedia will discover and use the template.
- See Maine for an example.
The horizontal templates are placed at the end of the article in a section called "Navigation".
One article might have multiple horizontal navigational templates.
For example, the article about Sue Bell Cobb has several such templates at the end of the article.
