"Supreme Court makes quiet revisions in rulings" by Adam Liptak | New York Times May 25, 2014
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice.
I stared at that sentence for a long, long time.
The revisions include “truly substantive changes in factual statements and legal reasoning,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and the author of a new study examining the phenomenon.
The court can act quickly, as when Justice Antonin Scalia last month corrected an embarrasing error in a dissent in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency.
But most changes are neither prompt nor publicized, and the court’s secretive editing process has led judges and law professors astray, causing them to rely on passages that were later scrubbed from the official record.
I think we have all been led astray by government and its ma$$ media mouthpiece. The la$t ba$tion was $uppo$ed to be the courts, but even they have corrupted by the corporati$m. And is it really any $urpri$e? They are all from that cla$$. It's a rich man's court when it comes to AmeriKan ju$tice; the only one who can't $ee it is the blind lady with the scales.
The widening public access to online versions of the court’s decisions, some of which do not reflect the final wording, has made the longstanding problem more pronounced.
What? Then why is the ma$$ media making such a big deal over the debate and announcements of verdicts?
And the fact that the $ecretive court has been caught doing this is a problem. We no longer have a constitutional government, folks. It's all writ and fiat and the days of King George.
Unannounced changes have not reversed decisions outright, but they have withdrawn conclusions on significant points of law. They have also retreated from descriptions of common ground with other justices, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor did in a major gay rights case.
Oh. I thought it was something serious.
The larger point, said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a law professor at Stanford, is that Supreme Court decisions are parsed by judges and scholars with exceptional care. “In Supreme Court opinions, every word matters,” he said. “When they’re changing the wording of opinions, they’re basically rewriting the law.”
The que$tion is IN WHO$E FAVOR?
Supreme Court opinions are often produced under intense time pressure because of the court’s self-imposed deadline, which generally calls for the announcement of decisions in all cases argued during the term before the justices leave for their summer break.
Well, stay in session longer and get the job done right you pompou$ jerks! And look at the NEW$PAPER MAKING EXCU$ES for them.
As for that second thing, I might be taking one myself. This sucks now. Reading and reporting on the ma$$ media has outlived its usefulness. It's time to go somewhere else and do something else.
The court does warn readers that early versions of its decisions, available at the courthouse and on the court’s website, are works in progress. A small-print notice says that “this opinion is subject to formal revision before publication,” and it asks readers to notify the court of “any typographical or other formal errors.”
Yeah, all they are doing is correcting typos.
But aside from announcing the abstract proposition that revisions are possible, the court almost never notes when a change has been made, much less specifies what it was.
It's like the corrections in a newspaper.
Four legal publishers are granted access to “change pages” that show all revisions. Those documents are not made public, and the court refused to provide copies to The New York Times.
The inspiration for this one day wonder of an article.
The only way the public can identify most changes is by painstaking comparison of early versions of decisions to ones published years later.
Sort of like the rewritten, recited, censored slop churned out by the propaganda pre$$ that I later must search for.
--more--"
Meanwhile, a former fart is getting a lot of pub for saying we need to change the Constitution (the theme of his latest book!). Maybe we should just follow it instead.
Looks to me like the court serves the usual crowd while turning a blind eye to other things. I don't know about the ethics of such things and I don't know what they are looking at down there, but they only seem concerned when it affects them personally (I guess we now know why Roberts flipped on Obummercare; my first thought was which prostitutes is he visiting, but it could be something else). Maybe a good tasering would wake them up, or did. It's time somebody blew the whistle on them (who remembers Enron, 'eh?).
I wouldn't want to bet the house on the Supreme Court's decisions.
As for the rest of the stuff the Globe trotted out, I didn't care to look or see what $elf-$erving interests they were promoting. Time to change the channel and not get all juiced up over labels that don't mean anything.
May God help us all with any hot air coming from the Supreme Court superheroes in the future.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
Supreme Court rejects attempt by reporter to shield source
Maybe you ma$$ media pre$$ guys will start waking up!
