Justices show how disclosing revisions offers (confers?) benefits – Adam Liptak, NYT – “Supreme Court opinions are not set in stone. Justices keep editing them after they are issued, correcting factual errors and even misstatements of law. For decades, those changes were made largely out of sight. But in October, on the first day of the term, the court announced that it would start disclosing after-the-fact changes to its decisions. As of this month, the court’s website had flagged revisions to seven of them. The most extensive changes came on the last day of the term, in a blockbuster ruling that struck down two parts of a Texas abortion law. In the version of the majority opinion released on the morning of June 27, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that “neither of these provisions offers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon access that each imposes.” A little after 6 p.m., according to the court’s website, Justice Breyer revised the sentence, choosing a different verb: “confers” instead of “offers.” “Neither of these provisions,” he now said, “confers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon access that each imposes.” He changed four other passages, too, expanding here and clarifying there. The same-day revisions suggested that the editing of the opinion had gone down to the wire, and then across it. A couple of years ago, Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, revealed that the court had routinely been revising its decisions, altering them without public notice weeks, months and sometimes years after they were first issued. Professor Lazarus urged the justices to disclose the changes. “The court can both make mistakes and admit mistakes without placing its institutional integrity at risk,” he wrote in The Harvard Law Review. To its credit, the court — never one for rapid change — listened. Justice Breyer’s revisions appeared to be stylistic. Others during the term corrected legal and factual errors. On the last day of June, for instance, a deputy solicitor general Michael R. Dreeben, wrote a letter to the court saying there had been a mistake in a decision issued a few weeks before. He asked the court to fix the error, and, a week later, it did.”