jurisprudence

The New York Times Jeremy W. Peters reports that Democrats have reversed the partisan imbalance on federal appellate courts from one that favored conservatives: "For the first time in more than a decade, judges appointed by Democratic presidents considerably outnumber judges appointed by Republican presidents. The Democrats’ advantage has only grown since late last year when they stripped Republicans of their ability to filibuster the president’s nominees." Democratic appointees hold a majority of seats on nine out of the 13 Courts of Appeals, Peters adds.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts joined with "unexpected allies--his liberal colleagues--in an alliance that drew some of the Supreme Court's major decisions closer toward the ideological middle in the term just concluded," the Wall Street Journal reports. For example, Roberts aligned with the liberal justices and conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy to uphold a precedent allowing securities fraud class-action plaintiffs to rely on the theory that market prices reflect all publicly available information and that keeping information from investors can constitute fraud on the market. But the test was refined so that corporations can more easily get class actions thrown out, WSJ reports.

David Zvenyach, GC to the Council of the District of Columbia, is using an application written in JavaScript to crawl the U.S. Supreme Court's opinions to find changes made without notice to the public, Gigaom reports.

The New York Times' Adam Liptak recently reported on how the justices are surreptiously changing their opinions after they have been issued, sometimes replacing language with something entirely different.

Changes will be tweeted out to @Scotus-servo.

The U.S. Supreme Court may be treating case law like it's Wikipedia, New York Times' Adam Liptak reports: "The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice. 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."

Jeffrey L. Fisher, another law professor, told Liptak, "“In Supreme Court opinions, every word matters,' he said. 'When they’re changing the wording of opinions, they’re basically rewriting the law.”'

A study shows that U.S. Supreme Court justices back freedom of speech when the speakers share a similar political world view, the New York Times' Adam Liptak reports. For example, Justice Antonin Scalia voted to uphold the free speech rights of conservative speakers 65 percent of the time and liberal ones 21 percent.