Clever piece of code exposes hidden changes to Supreme Court opinions by Jeff John Roberts.
From the post:
Supreme Court opinions are the law of the land, and so it’s a problem when the Justices change the words of the decisions without telling anyone. This happens on a regular basis, but fortunately a lawyer in Washington appears to have just found a solution.
The issue, as Adam Liptak explained in the New York Times, is that original statements by the Justices about everything from EPA policy to American Jewish communities, are disappearing from decisions — and being replaced by new language that says something entirely different. As you can imagine, this is a problem for lawyers, scholars, journalists and everyone else who relies on Supreme Court opinions.
Until now, the only way to detect when a decision has been altered is a pain-staking comparison of earlier and later copies — provided, of course, that someone knew a decision had been changed in the first place. Thanks to a simple Twitter tool, the process may become much easier.
See Jeff’s post for more details, including a twitter account to follow the discovery of changes in opinions in the opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States.
In a nutshell, the court issues “slip” opinions in cases they decide and then later, sometimes years later, they provide a small group of publishers of their opinions with changes to be made to those opinions.
Which means the opinion you read as a “slip” opinion or in an advance sheet (paper back issue that is followed by a hard copy volume combining one or more advance sheets), may not be the opinion of record down the road.
Two questions occur to me immediately:
- We can distinguish the “slip” opinion version of an opinion from the “final” published opinion, but how do we distinguish a “final” published decision from a later “more final” published decision? Given the stakes at hand in proceedings before the Supreme Court, certainty about the prior opinions of the Court is very important.
- While the Supreme Court always gets most of the attention, it occurs to me that the same process of silent correction has been going on for other courts with published opinions, such as the United States Courts of Appeal and the United States District Courts. Perhaps for the last century or more.
Which makes it only a small step to ask about state supreme courts and their courts of appeal. What is their record on silent correction of opinions?
There are mechanical difficulties the older records become because the “slip” opinions may be lost to history but in terms of volume, that would certainly be a “big data” project for legal informatics. To discover and document the behavior of courts over time with regard to silent correction of opinions.
What you thought the Supreme Court said may not be what our current record reflects. Who wins? What you heard or what a silently corrected record reports?