Talk:Wiggins v. Smith

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

⚖
Law Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Law, an attempt at providing a comprehensive, standardised, pan-jurisdictional and up-to-date resource for the legal field and the subjects encompassed by it.
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale.
??? This article has not yet received an importance assessment on the assessment scale.
A fact from Wiggins v. Smith appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 16 October 2007.
Wikipedia

This article is part of WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases, a collaborative effort to improve articles related to Supreme Court cases and the Supreme Court. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page.
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale.

[edit] Style

I'm not sure what the current style guidelines are for court case articles, but to my ears the article sounds very formal and stilted, with a lot of "counsel" and "defendant". Very apropos for legal briefs/specialist writing, but it sounds very stuffy for a general encyclopedia, in my opinion. That said, once the article disappears from the main page, I doubt that non-legally-inclined people (such as myself) will visit the page with any frequency, so a specialist tone may indeed be appropriate. Just something to think about. -- 19:41, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Guidelines

I don't know what the guidelines are. There are not many good articles to imitate. Here is a few I can find. Some are enormously long but I cannot, at the moment, find one of those.

In any case, the article is about mental health law and is meant for reference to articles of interest to forensic psychology, such as competency evaluation, including competency to be executed, mitigating factors, etc. so they are probably not of much interest to attorneys. These cases are vital to forensic mental health practitioners, however. --Mattisse 20:03, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

P.S. Forensic mental health practitioners have to use the legal language of attorneys for any credibility in reports to judges and courtroom testimony. However, if you can make the article more legible that would be great. The best help is when an occasional attorney stops by one of my attempts at these articles on legal decisions and corrects a misuse of a legal word! --Mattisse 20:07, 16 October 2007 (UTC)