A New York Times article this weekend explained that many U.S. Supreme Court decisions are altered after they have been published, sometimes quickly and other times much later.  Article author Adam Liptak explains:

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.

The court can act quickly, as when Justice Antonin Scalia last month corrected an embarrassing error in a dissent in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency.

But most changes are neither prompt nor publicized, and the court’s secretive editing process has led judges and law professors astray, causing them to rely on passages that were later scrubbed from the official record. 

I have followed this particular change because of my interest in the EPA case, but I suspect this article is the first many people had heard of it.  It makes some sense that articles would be fixed before going to final print, but the idea that opinions have been changed…