13.06.2014 - 10:33 [ Techdirt ]

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

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 Because of that, many people were still relying on the old and outdated versions.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.