Quick Hack Will Now Alert People When The Supreme Court Quietly Changes Rulings On Its Site

from the but-only-if-they're-updated-there dept

A few weeks ago, we covered a NY Times article about how the Supreme Court was quietly changing rulings well after they had been released -- and often doing so without notifying anyone other than a few big legal publishers. Because of that, many people were still relying on the old and outdated versions. A few people suggested setting up an automated system to just check the Supreme Court website for changing documents and monitor those changes -- and that's exactly what someone has done.

Lawyer David Zvenyach quickly hacked together a system to check the Supreme Court's website every five minutes for any opinion that changes, and to then automatically tweet out an announcement @SCOTUS_servo. He then follows it up with a manual explanation of the change, and recently added a feature that will highlight the actual change in the document.

This is great -- though, it assumes that the Supreme Court will always update its website with the latest rulings. As the original article pointed out, that doesn't always happen. Still, it's a step in the right direction, though there's absolutely no reason that the Supreme Court doesn't do this itself. And, in the meantime, as I discovered earlier this week in looking up a certain case, it's not just the Supreme Court that does this, but many other courts as well. Perhaps we'll need to get Zvenyach to set up similar feeds for each of the different circuit appeals courts as well...

Here's the change. pic.twitter.com/nwh3txJ06C

— SCOTUS Servo (@SCOTUS_servo) June 12, 2014

Filed Under: changes, court rulings, david zvenyach, supreme court