{"id":773943,"date":"2026-07-20T13:51:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T13:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/773943\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T13:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T13:51:09","slug":"almost-half-of-americans-view-scotus-as-political","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/773943\/","title":{"rendered":"Almost Half of Americans View SCOTUS as Political"},"content":{"rendered":"

The justices, just like us here at SCOTUSblog, are unfortunately not immune to making errors in their writing \u2013 despite the many rounds of edits by clerks and other justices. In fact, opinion revisions have been a part of the court\u2019s proceedings since its earliest days<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Over the last few decades, justices have also revised their opinions, sometimes in significant, substantive ways after their release. In Lawrence v. Texas<\/a>, Justice Sandra Day O\u2019Connor deleted<\/a> a full sentence characterizing Justice Antonin Scalia\u2019s dissent, and in Environmental Protection Agency v. EME Homer City Generation<\/a>, Scalia made a \u201chigh-profile mistake and correction<\/a>,\u201d rewriting a passage in his dissent that had mischaracterized the EPA\u2019s argument in a 2001 Supreme Court ruling (a decision he had authored, no less). In 2008, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito voted to rehear a case in which Justice Anthony Kennedy had made his own \u201chigh-profile correction<\/a>\u201d to the court\u2019s decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana<\/a>, which banned the death penalty in the case of child rape. Kennedy\u2019s decision had incorrectly stated the existing federal law around the death penalty for child rape; he wrote that in 30 states and under federal law the death penalty was barred for the non-fatal rape of a child, but he neglected to mention a federal law passed two years earlier that permitted the death penalty in military justice cases for that offense.<\/p>\n

Corrections like these are supervised by the Reporter of Decisions, whose office has managed the revision process \u201cat least since the early twentieth century<\/a>.\u201d Each slip opinion contains a notice asking readers to report \u201ctypographical or other formal errors\u201d to the Reporter, whose office also reviews opinions. (Former Reporter Frank Wagner once said<\/a> readers contact the office 10-20 times per year, although few of them actually warrant changes.) The Reporter compiles all suggested changes and sends them to the authoring justice, who then accepts or rejects each suggestion. Since 1994, substantive changes have reportedly required approval by the full court. Approved corrections are then added to the opinion as it moves from slip form<\/a>, to preliminary print, to the bound U.S. Reports, which the court says alone contains the \u201cfinal, official\u201d text. In 2015<\/a>, the court began annotating slip opinions<\/a> to show where there had been changes. The change came after<\/a> Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus\u2019 2014 law review article, \u201cThe (Non) Finality of Supreme Court Opinions<\/a>\u201d brought widespread awareness to the revisions.<\/p>\n

So what has been corrected in the current term\u2019s opinions?<\/p>\n

As of July 14, revisions have been made in nine cases. One replacement was made in the 194-page<\/a> Trump v. Barbara<\/a>, which struck down President Donald Trump\u2019s executive order ending birthright citizenship. On page 28 of Thomas\u2019 91-page dissent, a quote initially attributed to \u201cSenator Reverdy Williams\u201d was changed to \u201cSenator George Williams.\u201d Supreme Court watchers caught the mistake the day the opinion was issued: National Review Online writer<\/a> Dan McLaughlin posted<\/a> on X that \u201cThomas & Alito both cite a Senator \u2018Reverdy Williams\u2019 in their dissents, but pretty sure they mean Reverdy Johnson (D-MD), who was a vigorous participant in the Senate debates.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for other revisions, most of these have been minor grammatical fixes or spelling changes (for instance, in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment<\/a>, one word was changed \u2013 from<\/a> \u201chave plaintiffs show any way\u201d to \u201chave plaintiffs shown any way\u201d \u2013 and in Abouammo v. United States<\/a> \u201cmeans rea\u201d was changed to \u201cmens rea.\u201d)<\/p>\n

And as SCOTUSblog editor Sarah Isgur noted<\/a> the day Hunter v. United States<\/a> was released, the wrong version of \u201cforgo\u201d appeared on the first page<\/a> of Justice Neil Gorsuch\u2019s concurrence. \u201cToday, the Court begins to correct course,\u201d Gorsuch wrote. \u201cIt rules that prosecutors may not always leverage their plea-bargaining power to induce a defendant to forego the right to contest his sentence on appeal.\u201d Sarah: \u201cFun fact: Forego means to go before. Forgo means to waive. Therefore, I predict this little typo is going to be revised for the foregoing reason.\u201d And so it was<\/a>. In Trump v. Slaughter<\/a>, one word and a comma was changed on page eight of Justice Sonia Sotomayor\u2019s dissent \u2013 from \u201cIf, it was true\u201d to \u201cIf it were true.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other edits have been (slightly) more substantive. In Louisiana v. Callais<\/a>, the opinion text was changed from \u201cArgued October 15, 2025\u2014Decided\u201d to \u201cArgued March 24, 2025\u2014Reargued October 15, 2025\u2014Decided April 29, 2026,\u201d and in United States v. Hemani<\/a>, \u201cTylenol with codeine\u201d was changed to \u201cRobitussin with codeine.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The justices, just like us here at SCOTUSblog, are unfortunately not immune to making errors in their writing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":699836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-773943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}