Practitioners Pleased by Preliminary Prints
It’s an issue that's a bit arcane, but changes made to how the high court will publish versions of opinions this session —and going forward— are starting to show up and it’s a welcome change for SCOTUS practitioners with pagination concerns, even if a transition period may complicate things for some.
University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor emeritus Arthur Hellman was the first to flag the change for us: the U.S. Supreme Court is now pushing out preliminary print versions of opinions at a clip not seen in years.
The change was mentioned by the court in its opinion website: “Slip opinions remain posted until replaced with opinions edited to reflect the usual publication style of the United States Reports.”
“This will make the official United States Reports citation of opinions available in advance of formal publication,” said SCOTUS PIO Patricia McCabe in an email.
Opinions are first released to the public as slip opinions which lack the details made available in final, bound versions - the literal bound versions published by the high court’s reporter. In the interim, preliminary prints are released which include the page and line numbers of the anticipated bound version. The most recent bound version is from October 2015, with preliminary print versions being available through parts of the 2016 term. but as of Monday afternoon SCOTUS had replaced six slip opinions published since the start of this year with their preliminary versions.
And while practitioners argue it will make it easier to format pin cites in briefs, it’s also manifesting in noticeable ways for opinions which have not yet been updated. That list is long, starting with the 2016 session, and SCOTUS watchers warn that could hurt those less familiar with the court’s formatting.
Using the new preliminary print opinion in Bittner, originally published in February, as an example: the opinion cites lines from 2022’s Gallardo v. Marstiller in reference to “the rules of statutory construction,” but in place of usual citation numbers it has blank spots.
This is because Gallardo is still published in slip form.
“That’s not very helpful because it’s ‘the traditional rule of statutory construction,’ that’s a very general sort of thing,” Hellman said, pointing to the context of the citation. “And this opinion tells us there’s two places where the court talks about it, but sorry folks, you’ll have to page through the opinion and find it yourself.”
A request for comment on the backlog of slip opinions sent to SCOTUS was not returned.