Talk:Supreme Court of the United States

John or John G.?

Through some oversight (probably mine), there are two pages for the Chief Justice (one at John G. Roberts and one at John Roberts). Please see the talk page at the former for a comment. Michel van der Hoek 02:39, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

The other page has now been disbanded, though at last check the announced deletion had not occurred yet. Michel van der Hoek 04:23, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Table of Justices

I have added a table of all Supreme Court justices. This may clog this article and perhaps we ought to move it to a separate article (subpage?) about the history of the Supreme Court. I'll leave it here for now. Michel van der Hoek 02:55, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

I was thinking that as well. It would probably work as a catalog. Shamira Gelbman 02:59, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Not sure what to do with it. I know that in the long run it cannot stay in this article but because the main article page is still in such an embryonic stage of development I don't want to do anything with it yet. I have no experience with "catalogs" on CZ so I'm not sure that's where it ought to go. It could be its own subpage. Let's see how this article and this topic develops and plug it in where it seems to make most sense. Michel van der Hoek 04:26, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Religious affiliation of justices

A New York Times article today reminded me that I've been puzzled for some time by the hit-or-miss identification of the religious affiliations of justices in the current version of the CZ article. The two Italian-Americans, Scalia and Alito, are identified as Roman Catholic, but none of the others (Catholic or otherwise) have religious affiliations listed. I was surprised to learn from the Times article that fully 6 of the 9 are Roman Catholic; there are also 2 Jews and 1 "Protestant" (Stevens, whose specific denomination I've been unable to discover). The article also somewhat haphazardly gives other demographic information about individual justices, though it doesn't mention geography, in which the Times article suggested the court is currently extremely non-diverse (with most justices coming from the BosWash corridor), or previous judicial experience (Sotomayor is the only one who has ever been a trial judge). The current wording, unfortunately but I'm sure inadvertently, seems to suggest that "Roman Catholic jurist" equals "right-wing extremist". If we're going to give demographic information about justices, should we do it uniformly, perhaps in a table outside the main article? Bruce M. Tindall 17:36, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

If anything, I think the justices' religious affiliations belong in their individual articles, not in the article about the Supreme Court. Shamira Gelbman 18:13, 10 October 2009 (UTC)