“That said, the odds are astronomical that a regular expression unintentionally filtered out the Minor v. Happersett and Slaughterhouse references.”
I don’t know anything about coding, but I DO know that in every screenshot comparison that Leo or Danae have posted thus far, the changes have involved pre-1875 Supreme Court cases (like Minor and Slaughterhouse).
Before 1875, Supreme Court cases were assigned volume numbers based on the clerk of the court. Starting in 1875, they adopted the U.S. Reports numbering system, and retroactively assigned volume numbers to earlier cases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporter_of_Decisions_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States
So whereas Minor had been 21 Wall. 162, it now became 88 U.S. 162. Slaughterhouse had been 16 Wall. 36, and it became 83 U.S. 36.
The pre-2006 Justia pages cited to all these older Supreme Court cases with their clerk volume numbers. Then they apparently used some bad code to try to change them to the U.S. Reports numbers.
So if you look at the screenshots from Luria (which show only a small portion of the case), you see several cases cited, three of which are pre-1875 cases. All three of those (Minor, Osborn, Babbitt) got affected (specifically, for all three the case name and pre-1875 citation were replaced by a hyperlink showing the US Reports citation), while all the post-1875 cases weren’t touched.
Leo and Danae have only posted images of, I think, 5 of their supposed 25 cases, and even then mostly just very narrowly cropped screenshots. I’ll go ahead and predict now that if they ever publish more thorough screenshots from those other 20, you’ll see that same pattern generally hold across all of them.
If that’s the case, then this becomes more curious in my opinion. Why not simply say, “Oh, we were changing all of the pre-1875 case references and that’s likely what happened. Nothing sinister - just a batch program update gone wrong.”
And why remove the change history from Wayback?
If they were simply changing volume numbers on a batch of pre-1875 cases, Stanley could’ve immediately given a very direct, very sensible answer to put the accusations to rest. Why the horsesh*t?
You are not very observant. Leo posted all 25 the the day I first published on it on the 21st. Not only that, I saw the live pages. We sent the links to other members of the press so we know, other journalists know what was live, before Justia blocked the wayback machine. Leo predicted they would. He was right, and Justia did the exact same thing in Aug 2011.
Your rock is there to the left. Its missing you.