Talk:Supreme Court of Justice (Austria)

page title

@Gryffindor: Could you please explain your page move? The OGH refers to itself as Supreme Court of Justice, and the move was never discussed.    FDMS  4    11:10, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

See German original term, also mentioned in the constitution. This is what we need to go by. Gryffindor (talk) 22:37, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Supreme Court of Justice (Austria)/GA2. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Mujinga (talk · contribs) 11:49, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Review

• Sorry you had the previous false start with another reviewer, I'll give some comments today Mujinga (talk) 11:49, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Good Article review progress box Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV () 3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant () Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

• Earwig gives no copyvio although sources are (mainly in) in German Mujinga (talk) 12:19, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
• Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Supreme Court of Justice (Austria)/archive1 threw up some interesting feedback which could have been integrated. For example, any thoughts on adding Ratz and Schmitz?
• Also BluemoonSet made some helpful comments at the recent discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Good_article_nominations#New_reviewer_issue
• Looking around at court-related GAs such as Court of King's Bench (England), Indiana Supreme Court and Oregon Supreme Court or related supreme court articles such as Federal Constitutional Court or Supreme Court of the United Kingdom might be helpful to think about structure. As one example, there could be a list of current judges.
• The text has unreferenced sections (as pointed out at FAC) and this is a GA quickfail. I'm prepared to wait for an answer on this, but unless things are referenced in the next few days it will be better to fail and wait for the article to be in a better state to be reviewed. I'm saying this per GA criterion 2b. Currently unreferenced parts are:
  • While the general courts deal with all civil and criminal cases as well as so-called "non-adversary proceedings" (Außerstreitverfahren), such as inheritance or guardianship matters.
  • A successful appeal-at-law not only overturns but utterly erases the ruling of the appellate court, sending the case down the ladder again. Decisions of trial courts − although not of appellate courts − that result from a trial court's invocation of an unconstitutional statute or an illegal ordinance can be challenged before the Constitutional Court by filing an "extraordinary appeal-at-law".
  • Between shortly after 1300 and shortly before 1800, the Habsburgs had gradually transformed their empire from a personal union of numerous independent realms and territories into a highly centralized unitary state.[42] Feudal structures had been replaced with rules-based bureaucracies, hereditary local potentates with professional civil servants. The consolidation and modernization of jurisprudence, on the other hand, had been allowed to lag. Civil and criminal procedure as well as the criminal code proper had made great strides forward during the reigns of Maria Theresa and Joseph II in the late 18th century, a period of rapid and profound reform.[43] In the early 19th century, Emperor Francis II had revolutionized the civil code. In terms of its organizational structure, however, the Court system was still essentially medieval.
• Stopping here for an answer on the above Mujinga (talk) 12:39, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Supreme Court of Justice (Austria)/archive1 threw up some interesting feedback which could have been integrated. For example, any thoughts on adding Ratz and Schmitz? – Ratz is paywalled and Schmitz handles a different court. The article already cites various English and German language academic books as well as historical and contemporary laws, so I don't see an urgent need to add more – especially not barely accessible or extraneous – sources.

Also BluemoonSet made some helpful comments at the recent discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Good_article_nominations#New_reviewer_issue – BluemoonSet's comment did not slip under my radar; I updated the justices and did attempt to further improve the prose. If I missed something I would kindly ask you to highlight what.

Looking around at court-related GAs such as Court of King's Bench (England), Indiana Supreme Court and Oregon Supreme Court or related supreme court articles such as Federal Constitutional Court or Supreme Court of the United Kingdom might be helpful to think about structure. As one example, there could be a list of current judges. – the Court has 60 justices, which would effectively render such a list unmaintainable. Furthermore, the only justice to have a standalone article is the president of the court and her article is a stub. Otherwise I'm absolutely open for suggestions on how to improve the article's structural organization.

The rest is  Done. Colonestarrice (talk) 16:11, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

Fail

OK I'm going to fail this article and I'll give my reasoning here. I started the review by checking for quickfails and noticed that there were several unreferenced passages. This is a quickfail under criterion 2b as I stated above. Since we just met when we each had a fake GA review done and we had quick, useful communication about it, I thought rather than failing the article i would give you a chance to fix the three passages. Unfortunately you haven't done this in a way which is verifiable for two of the three:

• While the general courts deal with all civil and criminal cases as well as so-called "non-adversary proceedings" (Außerstreitverfahren), such as inheritance or guardianship matters.
  • You've put six (!) references on this one sentence, with no indication where in those references exactly the citation is backed, so I cannot verify this sentence.

• A successful appeal-at-law not only overturns but utterly erases the ruling of the appellate court, sending the case down the ladder again. Decisions of trial courts − although not of appellate courts − that result from a trial court's invocation of an unconstitutional statute or an illegal ordinance can be challenged before the Constitutional Court by filing an "extraordinary appeal-at-law".
  • You've put two references on the first sentence, both of which are online lawbooks, I can't verify this sentence and in any case would suggest using secondary sources for this claim. The second sentence is backed by reference to an online lawbook in german with 151 articles, so I can't verify that sentence.

• In the early 19th century, Emperor Francis II had revolutionized the civil code. In terms of its organizational structure, however, the Court system was still essentially medieval.
  • You've put a page-numbered book reference on these two sentences, I couldn't access it to verify myself, but I can AGF it is correct.

Moreover, when I suggested you look at some sources recommended in the failed FA submission, you said "Ratz is paywalled and Schmitz handles a different court. The article already cites various English and German language academic books as well as historical and contemporary laws, so I don't see an urgent need to add more – especially not barely accessible or extraneous – sources." I find this a rather odd answer, since for the German language books on the article are inaccessible to me. By using a combination of a resource request at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange and the The Wikipedia Library Im sure you could get these two sources. I was able to get them both without bother (I do have institutional access though). You are right that the Schmitz is about a different court, nevertheless it might have been worth checking it anyway since it comes out so high on the google scholar search. I did check it and the mentions of the supreme court are minimal. The Ratz however is certainly worth adding, it's written by a former president of the court and the abstract reads:

The aim of this article is to give an overview of the tasks and the function of the Supreme Court of Justice in interaction with the other two “Highest Courts” of the Republic of Austria on the one hand, and the European Court of Human Rights as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union on the other hand. For this purpose introductory remarks will examine the Austrian understanding of the judiciary as a state power and judicial independence. The closing part of the article will particularly look into the role of the Supreme Court as highest instance in criminal matters.

Sorry to fail the article, but it clearly needs work. Best of luck with it in future. Mujinga (talk) 12:28, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Supreme Court of Justice (Austria)/GA3. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: User23242343 (talk · contribs)

Reviewer: Grnrchst (talk · contribs) 11:14, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

When I opened this review, I initially thought the article could be brought to GA through some tweaks, but the further I looked into it, the less I thought this article met the good article criteria. As of this nomination, I think this article is still a long way from meeting the criteria and unfortunately qualifies for a quickfail. I will attempt to demonstrate my rationale in some of the notes I collected while reading this:

• I will start off by noting that both the previous GA nomination and FA candidacy brought up a dearth of use of reliable English language sources, despite copious options to choose from in a cursory search of Google Scholar.[1] In particular, two sources were highlighted as substantial contributions to understanding of the supreme court, but I can see that neither have yet been added to the article:
  • Ratz, Eckart (2015). "The Supreme Court of Justice of the Republic of Austria". Frontiers of Law in China. Retrieved March 6, 2022.
  • Schmitz, Georg (2003). "The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Austria 19181920". Ratio Juris. 16 (2): 240–265. doi:10.1111/1467-9337.00235. ISSN 0952-1917.
• I would also highlight the following source as a potential source of information for this article:
  • Liebscher, Christoph (2014). "European Public Policy and the Austrian Supreme Court". Arbitration International. 16 (3): 357–366. doi:10.1023/A:1008924916249.
• The English language sources that are currently integrated into the article aren't cited much, usually only once or twice. This seems like an oddly small amount, especially given the amount of potential information that could be sourced from them. Were there little information about the Supreme Court available in English, such reliance on German sources would make sense, but there's clearly a lot of sources out there, so why aren't we using them?
• This lead section is far too short for an article of this length. At the very least, another full-length paragraph needs to be written for it. Consider checking the manual of style for lead sections and giving it an expansion based on what you feel might be missing. I will note that the lead currently includes very little about the court's powers/responsibilities and nothing at all about its history, so maybe start there.
• "While the general courts deal with all civil and criminal cases." This sentence is currently unsourced, which is odd, considering it previous did cite sources.
• It reads very odd that there is an entire dedicated "Miscellany" section for a single sentence about the existence of a library in the courthouse.
• I notice that the history section is largely about the structure and jurisdiction of the court over time, but there is little to nothing about its historical ruling on high-profile cases or how it was used by successive regimes. This is something I'd expect from a history section for a supreme court.
• The First Republic section is very repetitive, just restating that the Supreme Court changed little during certain transitional periods without any more information.
• Why is there no section for contemporary history? It reads very odd that the history section just stops in 1945, because the court's structure wasn't altered from that of the first republic. Is the history of the Supreme Court after 1945 just not worth telling?

In conclusion, I think this article fails to meet the GA criteria 2b and 3a. It is in desperate need of more robust sourcing and I think actually going through some better sources on the subject would end up fulfilling the issues I've found with completeness. There's very big gaps that I would expect to be filled in a good article about a Supreme Court, and there is just no way that these couldn't be through more dedicated sourcing. I would highly recommend going through more English language sources on the subject and adding them in the article; there is no shortage of these, there is just no reason not to be citing more of them and more often. Once the sourcing and completeness issues have been addressed, I would be more than happy to take another look, but I just don't think it's there right now. I wouldn't feel right passing it or even holding it in its current state. Apologies that you've waited so long for this outcome, I do hope you can continue to improve this article and get it to where I know it can be with some more time and effort. --Grnrchst (talk) 11:14, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.