Sunshine Review:WikiProject Sunshine litigation

From Sunshine Review

This project is a part of the greater WikiFOIA project.

The Sunshine Litigation Project is designed to build a comprehensive database of major open records litigation in all 50 states. It is already started at Court cases with an impact on state FOIA, but needs work and expansion. This is important for filling in the gaps of the various laws of the state. Many of the smaller details of open records requests do not appear in the laws. These records can include important details about time limits, inappropriate fees, the commingling of exempt and non-exempt materials, as well as many vague exemptions established by state statute. Thus, they are left to the courts of various states to determine. While this project consists of three major stages, it is an ever expanding project, as our list of major court cases grows.

[edit] Stage 1

The first stage involves eliminating red links by establishing stub pages for all existing court cases. This is important preliminary work for establishing the lists of court cases on state pages as well as establishing adequate lists on the main court case page.

To participate in this project, please go to Sunshine Review:WikiProject Sunshine litigation/Stage 1

[edit] Stage 2

The second stage involves expanding those law suits to include historical background, rulings and major precedents. For information on how to expand articles please go to Sunshine Review:WikiProject Sunshine litigation/Stage 2

[edit] Stage 3

The final stage involves expanding our list of cases and incorporating summary pages that capture major themes across the 50 states. For our current list of law suits please see Court cases with an impact on state FOIA.

[edit] Research pages

A good source for research is the Cornell website which lists opinions by state and court. Another excellent source, with direct search capabilities is FindLaw.com's listings by state.

[edit] User badge and talk pages

This user is a member of Sunshine litigation project

If you help build these articles, try adding the {{User SR Project Lawsuits}} template to your user page. This will enable you to quickly access this project page right from your user page whenever you're signed in so you can see what is going on with the project. It will also enable other contributors to see that you're part of this project in case they're looking for someone to help them with the project.

The Sunshine litigation project also has a talk page template to add to the discussion pages of all pages associated with the project. Simply add it by typing, {{WF lawsuits}} to any talk page. It looks like this:

This page is part of the WikiFOIA project, a portal of Sunshine Review dedicated to articles about major FOIA court cases in all 50 states. To participate: join (or just read up) at the Sunshine litigation project page, or contribute to the project discussion.

[edit] Project discussion

This is a great project. Thank you for getting it organized. I'll try to contribute some thoughts about how to categorize state sunshine lawsuit articles not just by year and by state, but also by the core sunshine issues litigated in a particular suit. Leslie Graves 07:06, 25 September 2009 (CDT)