Holy shit. How is this not highly illegal? That's like if Congress started changing laws without telling anyone...
And you can't really sue the guys...
And you can't really sue the guys...
The Supreme Court has a whole protocol for this: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinions.aspx ("Caution: These electronic opinions may contain computer-generated errors or other deviations from the official printed slip opinion pamphlets. Moreover, a slip opinion is replaced within a few months by a paginated version of the case in the preliminary print, and--one year after the issuance of that print--by the final version of the case in a U. S. Reports bound volume. In case of discrepancies between the print and electronic versions of a slip opinion, the print version controls. In case of discrepancies between the slip opinion and any later official version of the opinion, the later version controls.")
The GigaOm article is garbage: "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." They're trying to generate page-views by making it sound like the Justices are going back and changing the official record, and are being thwarted by a coder who swoops in to save the day.
In reality, what you have is a tool to see what changes between the "release candidate" and the "Gold Master." Still interesting, even without the manufactured drama.
The vast amount of legal, scholarly and media attention to an opinion happens on release day. When words change after release day, the public deserves to be immediately clued in to that -- even if many/most of them end up being typographical.
If the supreme court need to make changes it should be shown as a omnibus document with the changes indicated and I trust the justices will look at the revised motions and vote on all! the amended judgements.
If they don't they should be impeached for malfeasance in public office and replaced.
There's a non-binding vote in conference, and at that point the majority chooses a justice to write the draft opinion. The justice who write the opinion circulates it among the justices for recommended edits. That basically becomes the slip opinion.
Other justices can write concurring or dissenting opinions as they wish. The justices and change their mind at any point until their judgement is officially handed down. So (at least in my understanding, someone please educate me if I'm wrong) there is no vote on the majority opinion itself, but rather on the case and the general points of law.
Therefore there's no reason the other justices would feel the need to vote on revisions.
But as stated, it's well-known and well-documented that these opinions aren't finalized and what we see at first is just a draft. Frankly there's no one to blame but ourselves and the media for thinking otherwise. I don't really have any problem with this behavior - as the NYT noted the changes are noted, just not as publicly as they should be.
And if you are making revision you need to publish the actual changes not just slip out a new version ie para A3 delete last sentence and replace with "foo bar".
Dont they cover that at "judging school" to quote the E L wisty aka the late Peter Cook
2. After they're finally published in U.S. Reports, any changes are published as proper errata. However, the 'post on the website' is of a draft that's after the ruling but much, much before publication.
All this article is about tracking the changes that get made before the U.S. reports version is published, and the 'slip' version is essentially described as "this is a pre-release draft, read if you want but the following publications may be different and that will be binding, not this one". If you read a draft of a novel, do you expect the released version to include an errata of things that were changed from that draft?
Certainly when I have been involved in formal parliamentary style work we would never publish a draft.
For (1), you want to publish immediately, because the parties have already waited a long time to get the dispute resolved. For (2), you want to publish quickly, because the federal Courts of Appeal need to implement the new guidance in other cases, and may be holding cases that pose the same question pending the Supreme Court's resolution. For (3), you want to have enough time to polish something, because it will be referenced for decades to come.
The system of publishing a bench opinion, a slip opinion, and a final published opinion reflects these conflicting needs.
The SCOTUS website itself is excruciatingly clear about these points:
You actually can. Well, you can't "sue" them, but you can impeach and remove them. It's simply never actually happened before.
Because Congress has never passed a law preventing it?
> That's like if Congress started changing laws without telling anyone...
Except they do tell people. Quietly, and inconsistently, but they do tell them.
Having said that, I expect such stupidity to be debated in committee by the end of next week.
You might want to read up on past Congresses since the 113th is actually pretty tame compared to quite a few of the others. Speaker O'Neil could get quite vicious and he wasn't even the most powerful Speaker.
There's a difference between legislating what the Supreme Court can write in their decisions and legislating the manner in which the Supreme Court must publicize its decisions and changes to them.
And the issue, to be clear, here is the latter, not the former.
The most obvious The elastic clause of Article I, Section 8 (insofar as las specifying the manner of publication of Supreme Court decisions are "necessary and proper" for carrying into execution the judicial power specified in Art. III), and, additionally (for most decisions) the appellate jurisdiction clause of Article III, Section 2 (which limits the court in such cases to operate "under such regulations as Congress shall make".)
Anyway, I never argued Congress could make such a law anyway, I argued that they hadn't (thus the current behavior wasn't illegal), and that there was a substantial difference between regulating what the Court can write in a decision (substance) -- which someone suggested would be ridiculous -- and regulating how the Court must publicize decisions (process). I didn't say that either restriction would necessary be within the power of Congress, just that they were substantially different things.
For the reasons cited earlier in this post, I suspect that the kind of regulations that would be relevant to this discussion on process would be within Congress power, but that's somewhat beside the point. I mean, if Congress can't make a law regulating the process, that would be an even stronger form of the "Congress hasn't made a law" reason for it not being illegal.
" ...You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.' But the plans were on display...' o n display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.' `That's the display department.' `With a torch.' `Ah, well the lights had probably gone.' `So had the stairs.' `But look you found the notice didn't you?' `Yes,' said Arthur, `yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".'
But, by all means, vote for a D or an R this November because, yeah; they'll change things.