Supreme Court Website Fails, Temporarily Derailing Opinion (1)

The U.S. Supreme Court hit a snag in its plan to cope with the coronavirus outbreak, as the court’s website gave readers an error message when they tried to call up a new opinion posted online Monday.

Although the justices have postponed their courtroom sessions because of the outbreak, they are trying to press ahead with other business, including the release of opinions. The plan was to rely exclusively on the court’s website and forgo the tradition of announcing rulings from the bench and handing out hard copies to reporters.

Everything worked as planned when the court issued four opinions a week earlier. But on Monday, people interested in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s new opinion in a maritime contract case saw only an error message for about 20 minutes.

The good news: The error didn’t occur when the court was ruling in one of its higher-profile cases, such as pending clashes over LGBT job discrimination, the DACA deferred-deportation program, New York City gun-transportation rules and the Puerto Rico financial oversight board.

Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said the problem stemmed from a corrupt file sent from one of the court’s servers.

“There are layers of checks in place to quickly identify such a problem, but due to human error the problem took longer to identify today,” Arberg said in an email.

Snafus are unusual, but not unheard-of, at the court. In October 2014 the court handed out an orders list that omitted more than 30 pages, including orders that cleared gay marriage to start in as many as 11 new states. Days later, Justice Anthony Kennedy inadvertently stopped gay marriage in Nevada briefly with an order that contained the wrong case number.

(Updates with comments from Supreme Court spokeswoman in sixth and seventh paragraphs)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net

Laurie Asséo

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