Talk:West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette

Untitled

I am concerned about plagiarism on this page. Much of it is lifted verbatim from Findlaw.com. 69.150.233.158 (talk) 02:58, 28 February 2010 (UTC)Kalen

Dissent

I would suggest that information about Justice Frankfurter's dissent be added to this article. Frankfurter agreed substantatively with the Opinion of the Court, but wrote a lengthy dissent focusing on his beliefs regarding judicial restraint. Juansmith 07:22, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

I have added the following external link http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0319_0624_ZD.html to cover this. Feel free to use this link to expand the article in the direction that you desire perfectblue97 --perfectblue 15:03, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

This interpretation of Frankfurter's dissent is completely wrong. The opinion says he doesn't like making it mandatory, but he has no grounds to strike it down.

To quote, from the first paragraph:

I cannot bring my mind to believe that the "liberty" secured by the Due Process Clause gives this Court authority to deny to the State of West Virginia the attainment of that which we all recognize as a legitimate legislative end, namely, the promotion of good citizenship, by employment of the means here chosen.

The interpretation of his dissent is entirely wrong, and should be removed, or corrected. I've added in a brief section with a more accurate interpretation.

I mean, the guy had written an opinion only three years before that this decision was overturning, of course he didn't 'agree substatitively'

The "Facts of the Case" paragraph only provides insights and opinion. Should be renamed or removed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.166.213.65 (talk) 16:00, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I believe the article has changed significantly since the series of comments, above, on Frankfurter's Dissent were made, and that the issues have been reasonably addressed. Can this Talk section now be removed? --Youblend2 (talk) 04:00, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

reference link

the reference link should be removed and or redirected http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/faclibrary/case.aspx?case=WV_Education_v_Barnette following the link shows a "nothing found" page on the FAC-library — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.231.87.246 (talk) 03:41, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Intro sentence

I'll bite, @Lahaun:. Please explain why this is an improvement. postdlf (talk) 19:29, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

...and if you're going to make a habit of adding this to the intro sentence of every SCOTUS opinion article you can find, I suggest you start a thread discussing that at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases. postdlf (talk) 19:37, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

Crickets. And I see we have discussed this before here, or at least, I tried to discuss and you didn't bother. After you added it for the first time to the intro sentence of this article and I removed it back in March, you asserted your opinion without explanation, I gave a lengthy explanation of why I thought it was not a good idea, and you never elaborated or otherwise followed through. So I think it was inappropriate for you to restore your edit months later, contra WP:BRD, and without even attempting to discuss first, so I'm going to remove it again absent any substantive comment from you, @Lahaun:, as to why it's a good idea, not simply that you want it. postdlf (talk) 15:16, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Resolved at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases#Court split in lede. postdlf (talk) 20:51, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure what your dispute was, but it was pointed out to me today on reddit that there is an error in the first sentence.the decision was based on the free exercise clause, not the free speech clause. 2603:900A:2301:578B:2D12:D21:48D7:1A12 (talk) 02:54, 11 March 2023 (UTC)arbitrary aardvark. i litigate about this stuff and i missed it.

Sourcing

This article has so much unsorced content. We need to find some reliable sources. Weegeerunner (talk) 21:58, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

So it appears that we might have a copyright issue, looks like the whole article is copied from sources, against Wikipedia:Copying text from other sources. The First 4 paragraphs of the "Facts of the Case" section is identical to [1]. And the first 6 lines of "Decision of the Court" is identical to [2]. Not sure how to deal with this, I guess we are obliged to delete it? I've marked the problem on the page itself. Joseph2302 (talk) 22:24, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Hold your horses. The Court's opinion is of course public domain, and that's all the Cornell source posts, so I don't understand your concern about the facts section. Most of the decision section is also just quotes, and otherwise can be rewritten so it's not as close to the text of the Oyez summary (as I have done). postdlf (talk) 00:05, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Honestly, I was unsure about it all, hence my non-editing. So, just to clarify, it's always okay to quote/exactly copy public domain articles such as court papers? Joseph2302 (talk) 00:09, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes. While we don't want articles that are nothing but text dumps of source documents here, it's clearly been used in this instance as the skeleton for an article section. Explicit quotes don't make sense here (i.e., use of quotation marks) because there isn't anything particularly interesting or important about how the Court has phrased the facts (unlike the quoted rhetoric in the decision section) and we want editors to feel free to change the language so long as it remains accurate. postdlf (talk) 01:16, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Sooo... where can we find sources? Weegeerunner (talk) 18:12, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Nearly everything presently in this article is directly verifiable from the Court's opinion itself, so please feel free to add appropriate pinpoint cites. Otherwise, to expand it beyond just a summary of the opinion, do like you would for any other article and research the topics it is related to. Look for secondary sources about the First Amendment's free speech clause, history of Jehovah's Witnesses in the U.S., history of the pledge of allegiance/flag saluting, biographies of Robert Jackson, etc., and there are bound to be plenty of law journal articles just about this opinion and its jurisprudential progeny. It just requires putting in the time, probably a library visit or two because it's not necessarily going to be online. postdlf (talk) 18:49, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

I guess more of a rewrite would be more necessary, as content copied and pasted from other sources is not really encyclopedic. Weegeerunner (talk) 19:39, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Depends on the content and how it's organized. As I said above to Joseph2302, the copied text is a decent starting point as it's been used here, and many SCOTUS articles have started out that way (not to mention all the articles that began as copies of old, public domain Britannica articles, of data mining from census records, etc.). But provided you're actually familiar enough with this subject area (which I question, if you couldn't think of how to look for sources), you're welcome to develop the article further, though you'll still end up citing to the opinion itself for its own content even where it's not being literally quoted or copied. postdlf (talk) 20:08, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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Section Cleanup Templates

I have added two cleanup templates to two sections, and my reasons for doing so are explained in the templates themselves and are pretty clear, but I will repeat them here. The "Facts of the case" section fails to give specific facts related to who the Barnettes where, how many children they had, when they decided to have their children refuse to recite the pledge, when and how their children were expelled. The "Arguments" section says "Given the clear indications that at least five justices were ready to lay aside the Gobitis precedent, there was little else the state's lawyers could do," but provides no information on when or how those indications were given, ie, why they were so clear. Now seeing the discussion here that this article may contain a lot of copyright violations, I think the problems with these sections arises from excerpts being copied and pasted from a larger article on the case, so the confusing sentences were "orphaned" from their context. Mmyers1976 (talk) 17:04, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

Aren't references to the Supreme Court supposed to be capitalized?

The short answer is probably a pointer to some sort of style guide for Wikipedia, but in most of the contexts where I've read about it, the capitalized form Court is used when the reference is specific to an action of the Supreme Court (or some other specific high-level court). Shanen (talk) 04:24, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

"... refused to force the school board from requiring children to salute the flag ..."

From the last sentence of the Background section: "The West Virginia Supreme Court refused to force the school board from requiring children to salute the flag, which led to the federal lawsuit being filed."

The school board 'wanted' to compel students to salute the flag, and was doing so. Forcing an entity to do something it wants to do (and is doing) makes little sense; "refusing to force ..." makes almost none.

It also seems materially false, but without access to the cited reference, I'll suspend judgement on that.

I get the impression this was written by someone with poor English writing skills. "Force" reads like a default translation of a foreign word with different nuances (alternatives might be "empower", "authorize" or "affirm"). There also might me a negative missing somewhere ("refused to force the s.b. to 'not' require", etc.)

If I am misunderstanding, then the sentence should be rephrased to be more clear. 2600:4040:A055:8700:4DEB:C4BA:836:85A0 (talk) 17:38, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't have the Peters book at hand but when I do I'll give it a look. I agree that it is awkwardly worded, although it is technically correct: "force the school board from requiring" means that the school board was requiring children to salute the flag and the WVSC refused to stop them from doing so. With that being said, the insertion of a negative there would make it clearer.

However, it is best not to impugn the capabilities of another editor ("...written by someone with poor English writing skills"). Rather just say that there appears to have been an error somewhere along the way. Vyselink (talk) 05:06, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

I have replaced "force" with "enjoin", as that is the proper legal term. I suppose if people quibble that "enjoin" is not common enough it could be changed to something like "...refused to order the school board to stop requiring children...". But I prefer enjoin. Vyselink (talk) 05:25, 28 July 2023 (UTC)