The same can be said about the example I provided earlier from the Brown case, which had nothing to do with citizenship or Minor. As I said, this is site-wide.
No, the one you mentioned had no title given to it because it was MULTIPLE CASES. The text of the actual Brown v Bd of Education was not altered to get rid of the titles of the cases; the text clearly referred to those cases as the earliest cases - NOT by specific reference to any one of them.
IOW, what you showed did NOT have the text of the SCOTUS decision altered to get rid of a specific case title. And there was no place in that decision where a case was referred to only by its number and not by its title. So what you posted actually showed the exact opposite of what you claimed it showed. It showed that the alteration of the actual text of a decision is NOT a “problem” that the site suddenly corrected today, after Donofrio brought attention to it.
And philman 63 has shown the timeframe in which the text was altered to get rid of the “Minor v Happersett” reference. It was originally entered correctly and it took a concrete, specific action by somebody to alter that text.
If you read closely Leo Donofrio’s comment about the quite interesting edits to the Justia database, you will see that it’s not just a question of a missing case name.
In the case Pope v. Williams, Justia apparently greatly shortened the text of a crucial paragraph that referred to Minor vs. Happersett, as well as removed the name of the Minor case.
Kleon’s exemplar of an assumed problem with their software cannot explain the massive editing of that paragraph in the Pope case.
Can you give us more examples, Kleon? If not, then can you explain how you happened upon this one other instance, unrelated to Minor vs. Happersett?
If Justia had such a problem with their software, which damaged their “mission” to provide the public with accurate information, then where’s a notification on their site of this problem and an explanation for how it happened and when it happened and how and when they fixed it? Not to mention an apology and a promise to do better, or is that beyond the realm of possibility, given the personages involved?
One might surmise that the Brown case exemplar was a pre-planned rationale (aka, a cover story) for the “error” in those too conveniently removed references to Minor vs. Happersett, just in case somebody among the public should notice before the election. (Like “birthers”?)
Even so, even if there’s such a software error, it does not explain the edited paragraph in Pope, unless Kleon can show us that other cases were edited in the same way, with actual paragraphs from SCOTUS cases being shortened and with sentences removed from the text of the case.
How can Kleon explain the editing of that paragraph in the Pope vs. Williams case BEFORE July 25, 2008, just as with the Boyd vs. Nebraska case? Same timeframe exactly.
The Wayback Machine, on March 1 2007, has the only archived example prior to July 2008. This cached page from 2007 showed the full paragraph with the reference to Minor vs. Happersett BY NAME on the Justia website.
That paragraph has suddenly been “fixed” on Justia since Donofrio reported his finding. It remained in edited form on April 3, 2009—the last “crawl” for that webpage in the Wayback Machine. But in the Google cache, it still REMAINED in edited form on May 23, 2011.
Therefore, the paragraph was “fixed” between May 23, 2011 and today, but certainly after Leo Donofrio outed them. It was fixed within the past few days because when I read his comments ON June 30, 2011, I immediately LOOKED at the Justia site. The Pope case was exactly as Leo Donofrio portrayed it—allegedly “deceptively edited” for political reasons. Many people have saved screenshots, not only from Justia and the Wayback Machine, but also from the Google caches.
Here’s an excerpt from the paragraph in question, as it should and does read at the FindLaw site, which is for “legal professionals” as opposed to the public:
“The privilege to vote in any state is not given by the Federal Constitution, or by any of its amendments. It is not a privilege springing from citizenship of the United States. Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, 22 L. ed. 627. It may not be refused on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, but it does not follow from mere citizenship of the United States. In other words, the privilege to vote in a state is within the jurisdiction of the state itself, to be exercised as the state may direct, and upon such terms as to it may seem proper, provided, of course, no discrimination is made between individuals, in violation of the Federal Constitution.”
Now here’s the same paragraph, as “deceptively edited” according to Donofrio, from the Justia site, as it appeared between July 2008 until only a few days ago:
“The privilege to vote in any state is not given by the federal Constitution, or by any of its amendments. It is not a privilege springing from citizenship of the @ 88 U. S. 491. In this case, no question arises as to the right to vote for electors of President and Vice President, and no decision is made thereon. The question whether the conditions prescribed by the state might be regarded by others as reasonable or unreasonable is not a federal one. We do not wish to be understood, however, as intimating that the condition in this statute is unreasonable or in any way improper.”
Where’s the part about STATES controlling the right to vote in any election—it being within their jurisdiction? Meaning, one might suppose, that it’s up to the states to decide who gets on the ballot (vetting candidates) and decide specifics about electors and how they vote. Or so I assume, not being a lawyer myself but being able to read.
One can guess why, in July 2008, somebody was concerned about states acting upon their Constitutional right to control elections and also that inconvenient SCOTUS precedent that proves Obama was never eligible to be placed upon ballots, not being a natural born citizen, by his own admission. July 2008 was arguably when the “birther” issue began. When citizens began to write to their representatives and publicize this issue.
Here are links. First the web archive and then a link to Donofrio’s more specific explanation:
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20080801000000*/http://supreme.justia.com/us/193/621/case.html