Talk:Grutter v. Bollinger

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The title of this case is Grutter v. Bollinger, but the citation is not yet complete. Is it appropriate to place the citation as it is compiled so far, that is 539 U.S. ___ (2003) or to leave it out of the article until after the citation is complete?

it is now complete. it's citation is 539 U.S. 306 (2003)

3/15/06 In "Please note that the '25 years from now' phrase was echoed by Justice Thomas in a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Scalia," changed "concurring" to "dissenting". MKFreeberg 16:34, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I removed this:

Justice Thomas, in addition to arguing against the constitutional nature of the racial admission policy, also argued the issue based on the history of blacks in America, and on the fact that the law school's policy benefits black women but does not appear to assist black men to be admitted.

Besides being poorly written, I don't think this person got the point of Thomas's footnote; it was a sarcastic note that not all forms of underrepresentation had been dealt with (specifically, that of black males), not an actual plea that even more racial preferences would have solved the problem. This was a random footnote, anyway; if we're going to include more information, there's better stuff to add. SnowFire 20:50, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Possible COPYVIO concern

A review of Grutter v. Bollinger shows there are common verbatim passages in the article with a Xanga blog by jrgini37 apparently posted August 2005. This issue of whether the material in WP was taken from the Xanga piece was raised on the WP Help Desk. However, it appears the material in the WP article significantly pre-dates the ones in Xanga (as early as June 2003). I looked at original court documents and could find no obvious reasons for identical language, but further research shows the highest correlation is with what purports to be a law school student's paper apparently published in 2004 by www.4lawschool.com. (I keyed in on the phrase, "perhaps twenty-five years hence, racial affirmative action would no longer be necessary in order to promote . . .".) Since I don't have a means for verifying the actual publishing date of the 4lawshool.com paper (which is copyrighted, by the way), or whether its author (Bram) is an incarnation of either jrgini37 or the contributor to this WP Grutter v. Bollinger article, I can't determine who is copying whom.

Consequently, I tagged this article for possible copyvio and listed it on Copyright problems/2007 July 4/Articles. Comments from anyone who can shed more light on this are welcome.
Jim Dunning | talk 14:57, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Note that in Grutter v. Bollinger, the "twenty-five years hence" sentence has been present since June 24, 2003. See this diff. That's one day after the Supreme Court's judgment in this case.[1] I find it somewhat unlikely that our contributor copied from that 4lawschool paper... rather the inverse. At the worst, both copied from a third source, but I haven't found any. Lupo 14:59, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Excellent point; I didn't notice those dates. I don't think the initial WP contributor did any copying, since the complete section of the article that shows up in Xanga and 4lawschool isn't fully developed until a week later on June 30, 2003 by an anon IP. Then the complete section is available to anyone after that date.
Jim Dunning | talk 15:14, 4 July 2007 (UTC)