[ Originally published on June 23rd, 2015 ]
LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE:
The
United
States
Supreme Court is legally allowed to reverse
and alter
their decisions, after the fact, without having to announce those
changes to the public; this is called a “slip
opinion.”
David
Zvenyach
[General
Counsel to the Council of the
District
of Columbia]
created
a JavaScript application node that searches these decision
alterations and posts them to Twitter
for the world to see.
The court’s secretive editing process has led many judges and law professors astray, causing them to rely on passages that were later scrubbed from the official record. The widening public access to varying online versions of the court’s decisions, some of which do not reflect the final wording, has made the longstanding problem even more pronounced.
“In
Supreme Court opinions, every word matters,”
said
Stanford
law professor
Jeffrey
L. Fisher.
Adding:
“When
they’re changing
the wording
of opinions, they’re basically rewriting the law.”
Zvenyach,
along with fellow coder Joshua
Tauberer,
have created software that brings these changes to the public’s
attention by posting them to the project’s
online social
media account.
All of the court changes that they find and post are STORED HERE for perpetuity as downloadable PDF and text files.
Stay conscious my friends.
~ Merit Freeman
DOWNLOAD AS PDF:
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