from Hacker News

Clever piece of code exposes hidden changes to Supreme Court opinions

by adelevie on 6/12/14, 6:33 PM with 94 comments

  • by konklone on 6/12/14, 6:57 PM

    I think this is such a great example of a small bit of tech that completely changes the dynamic of how we understand the Court's work.

    The NYT spent a whole high-profile article highlighting the issue of a silently shifting court record. This completely removes the "silently".

  • by ww520 on 6/12/14, 9:20 PM

    It would be a good idea to put the legal documents in a version control system. Then all the revisions can be tracked.

    It's time to adopt the ideas we've learned in CS to other professions.

  • by hyperliner on 6/12/14, 9:33 PM

    This reminded me of an idea somebody else had of publishing everybody's votes in a federal or state election to the web. Everybody would get a unique, secret key right after voting with your voting choices. The machine would publish that key and the vote, but not your identity. You would then be able to, in the privacy of your own home, confirm that your vote has not been altered, while keeping your vote secret unless you choose to make your secret key public. Assuming enough people found discrepancies, a major revolt could be created in the event of the elections officials altering results in closely contested elections.

    If only we could get a transcript of legislators' or government officials' conversations with influence groups...

  • by rmchugh on 6/12/14, 7:49 PM

    Nice piece of work. It would be cool if you could OCR the text out of the pdfs (perhaps using ocrad.js) and push the text in as a GitHub commit. In that way, you would have a full history of all changes to a document.

  • by charonn0 on 6/12/14, 9:53 PM

    There is so much potential in applying version control to legal and legislative documents. Imagine being able to git blame a bill in Congress.

  • by stagas on 6/13/14, 1:20 PM

    Interesting acronym, SCOTUS, in Greek[0] means darkness, blindness, obscurity.

    [0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%B...

  • by rdrdss23 on 6/12/14, 7:09 PM

    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...

  • by thinkcomp on 6/12/14, 8:12 PM

    In my case against Ben Mezrich, Judge Collings cited WikiAnswers (wiki.answers.com) to define the term non-fiction. Except that he cited a page on WikiAnswers that was off by one character from the page he intended to cite. I didn't know this, and assumed he'd just made everything up, since nothing matched what he quoted. It took me over a year--after appealing based in part on his error--to accidentally realize that the link was bad.

    He still refuses to admit that he made any sort of mistake.

    I filed a Motion for Reconsideration, which you can find here:

    http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=34312001&z...

    Other judges refuse to cite wiki citations at all. When I brought the issue to the attention of the First Circuit as misconduct, they dismissed it, carefully refusing to use the word "wiki" in their public Orders because that might admit that judges cite wikis whenever they feel like it. I appealed; they refused to use "wiki" in the Order once again. Instead, they refer to an "on-line source."

    http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/files/01-13-90016.O.pd... http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/files/01-13-90016.J.pd...

    Wiki citations can be edited by anyone, including adverse parties, during or after proceedings, presenting the exact same problem as silent edits in opinions after they have already been issued. Whenever there is a better source they should never be cited. The behavior of Judge Collings, the First Circuit, and the Supreme Court does not inspire much confidence in the Courts.

  • by andrewfong on 6/12/14, 7:54 PM

    If you're interested in this, you may also want to check out https://www.courtlistener.com/, a service that regularly crawls court websites for opinions. Not sure if they show multiple versions though.

  • by WhoBeI on 6/13/14, 7:57 AM

    This smells of mitigation and not patch. Simply require the supreme court to publish all their opinions, rulings and changes so that they are available to the public.

    We can review them... We have the technology.

  • by Fando on 6/13/14, 12:07 AM

    Amazing. An effective and simple way of increasing transparency and maybe even accountability. Great work!

  • by comrh on 6/12/14, 7:04 PM

    Another victory for opendata! Great project.

  • by JOnAgain on 6/12/14, 8:53 PM

    Back to paper.

  • by grecy on 6/12/14, 10:55 PM

    That strikes me as eerily similar once again to 1984. The government retro-actively changes recorded history when it suits.

    We've always been at war with Eurasia.

  • by fiatjaf on 6/12/14, 9:52 PM

    "Node, an application written in JavaScript"