Hi Guys.
Justia put Robots.txt on their entire site when we reported in October. There is now no way to know what they changed by using the WaybackMachime.
One must go an compare the text they put up against a subscription site like Lexis or Westlaw, or have a SCOTUS Court Reporter to tell if they are actually presenting the full text of the case. At first they put up disclaimer up stating that they weren’t responsible if the text wasn’t exact. Then they changed that to stating that it was the text of the case, NOT the FULL text of the case.
Do not use Justia. They cannot be trusted.
You will only make more work for yourself by using them because you have to check ever darned thing they publish. Same goes for any company using SCOTUS feeds from Public.Resource.org, and that includes Cornell Law.
Pretty damn sad isn’t it?
I agree you can't trust Justicia. I was just thinking that if they never make the full text available, that is further proof that they intentionally altered the text. In addition, that might be easier to understand (they said it was an unintentional technical error but the text is still altered) for some than discussions about robots.txt.
I am not suggesting that you yourself spend all your time on this. It might be a good project for somebody on Breitbart, National Review, etc. But maybe the reason you have not had more help from those folks is that they are afraid they will be smeared with the "Birther" tag. Indeed, many today have a 30-second-sound-byte-attention-span. Or shorter. It appears that leftists have created a mountain of disinformation. For too many, this disinformation is now "common knowledge."
Thanks for your excellent work. I am just now discovering it.
for the most part, it's not a matter of 'trusting' justia. generally, justica doesn't do what i need.
to me, justia has never been more than a blip in the field of legal research. justia itself wasn't that big a deal - except for what hotlinking, appealing to nonlawyers, lawyers looking to quote a case without researching through the case using keynotes and shepardization. i'd love to see the number of users. most attorneys were still using westlaw and lexis, and other sources. justia and other free sources may be the wave of the future, but the things justia doesn't do kept it from being a key source for legal research, despite the google connection. take me. justia? meh.
you must consider what i do. if i'm writing a white paper, an article for publication, a chapter for a book (or the complete book, although i've only been published in that form a couple of times), or doing that background research for another attorney's memo or brief; or if i'm presenting something in class as an adjunct professor, i must (must, must, must) shepardize any case i cite.
so i use lexis or westlaw for that.
if there's a keynote in a case - a particular subpoint in a case - i can use lexis or westlaw to find cases that discussed that subpoint. justia? dont' make me laugh.
but with findlaw.com or justia, if i just need to find a quote from a case or need to refresh my memory as to what was dictum and what was actually ruled, i can pull it up.
justia's other 'big selling point' is that you could hotlink to justica. a person reading your article (for which you used westlaw or lexis) could be given a hotlink to justia so they could read the case, free, themselves.
i'll need to see if other sources, such as supremecourt.gov can be hotlinked.
personally, i site a few hundred cases a week. i rarely used justia.
finally, you don't need to compare the text against a scotus court reporter, do you? can't you compare it against the text at supremecourt.gov?
and off the record, isn't the oyez project great? i love listening to the actual recording of the original oral arguments.
i'm aware. it was in your second article and in one of leo's. i'm not a litigator and haven't cracked an evidence book in a while, but i believe this could be considered as evidence to support the claim lexia tweaked only the natural born citizen cases.
if this were an attempt to repair a dangerous condition, it may not be admissible - the value to society of fixing a problem outweighing the prejudicial value of introducing it to show evidence that the party knew of the defect. Here, the only value of the robots.txt code was to (a) make it impossible to view screenshots of old versions of pages and (b) keep the wayback crawler from crawling the lexia pages and taking screenshots in the future.
where's the public benefit? i put on my 'i being fair and sitting in the middle' hat, and still the only thing i see is that it (a) keeps people from proving lexia's founder lied in his cnet interview about other non-'natural born citizen' cases being affected and (b) keeps reporters from nosing around and seeing for themselves the changes that had been made.
do i need to run to publix and buy a family-size roll of heavy duty reynold's wrap?