[rayiner]

It's because the slip opinion (the one posted on the court's website) is not canonical. The canonical version is what's published in the U.S. Reports.

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.

[konklone]

It's much more important than that. Yes, the protocol says it's only for errors/deviations. In practice, the changes can be more substantial.

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.

[walshemj]

Quite its "the words on the paper" I once spent an hour discussing with colleagues on a business committee (plus getting expert opinions from two officials) as to the exact meaning of "the" in a motion - to rule a motion in or out.

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.

[Amezarak]

That's not quite how SCOTUS operates.

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.

[michaelfeathers]

And, in general, the Justices don't even write the opinions. According to the book 'The Brethren' by Bob Woodward, the bulk of the text of opinions are often written by clerks and reviewed by their supervising Justice.

[walshemj]

Isn't a like a judge making an initial ruling and then the next week saying oops that death penalty thingy I have changed my mind?

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

[PeterisP]

1. The rulings of the case don't change, the explanatory comments and reasoning gets further edited after the ruling - any changes there would affect decisions in future cases, but not for this one.

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?

[walshemj]

I would expect the highest judicial court in the land to ONLY publish final documents any drafts should be between the justices and the clerks. Why do I say this to stop the risk of media jumping to conclusions and getting the wrong end of the stick and thus making the supreme court look like amateurs.

Certainly when I have been involved in formal parliamentary style work we would never publish a draft.

[rdrdss23]

Well that's a lot more reasonable - but it seems like they should just hold off on publishing the thing till they finish editing it. The system seems a bit sloppy

[rayiner]

A Supreme Court opinion has several functions: 1) it resolves a real live dispute between two parties; 2) it gives guidance to the other federal courts; 3) it serves as a statement of the law to the public.

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.

[tptacek]

Approximately nobody in the US would rather wait for the final binding version of the opinion, for avoidance of uncertainty, than read about the bench opinion on CNN. The very few people who care about this issue already know they need to watch for the preliminary and bound opinions.

The SCOTUS website itself is excruciatingly clear about these points:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/info_opinions.aspx

[mogrim]

Think of it as "open source justice", where more eyes means less bugs.