Supreme Court slips—and quick fixes

  • publically → publicly

    And the Surgeon General’s Office indicated both publicly and privately that it was disappointed in Facebook.

    — corrected in MURTHY v. MISSOURI

  • statues → statutes

    Three such statutes are relevant here: The Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940.

    — corrected in SEC v. JARKESY

  • excising → exercising

    In exercising its discretion, the court is free to agree or disagree with any of the policy arguments raised before it.

    — corrected in CONCEPCION v. UNITED STATES

  • offense → conviction

    For these reasons, we hold that a state drug conviction counts as an ACCA predicate if it involved a drug on the federal schedules at the time of that offense.

    — corrected in BROWN v. UNITED STATES

  • ascribe → adhere

    Employees of the Bureau and its subentities are not required to adhere to any particular religious faith, and the same is true for the recipients of their charitable services

    — corrected in CATHOLIC CHARITIES BUREAU, INC. v. WISCONSIN LABOR & INDUSTRY REVIEW COMM’N

  • unecessary → unnecessary

    In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive.

    — corrected in TRUMP v. CASA, INC.

  • complaint → compliant

    As written, though, the statute allows the government to invoke the stop-time rule only if it furnishes the alien with a single compliant document explaining what it intends to do and when.

    — corrected in CATHOLIC CHARITIES BUREAU, INC. v. WISCONSIN LABOR & INDUSTRY REVIEW COMM’N

  • Congress ⟷ the States

    To remedy that grievous error, Congress passed in 1866 and the States ratified in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which enshrined birthright citizenship in the Constitution.

    — corrected by switching the mixed references in TRUMP v. CASA, INC.

  • superfluidity → superfluity

    While not dispositive, this superfluity problem weighs in favor of a construction of “operated primarily for religious purposes” that looks to what an entity does rather than its motives.

    — corrected in CATHOLIC CHARITIES BUREAU, INC. v. WISCONSIN LABOR & INDUSTRY REVIEW COMM’N

  • disperses → disburses

    The Federal Government develops uniform eligibility criteria, recipients apply for assistance directly to the Federal Government, and the Federal Government disburses funds directly and uniformly to recipients without regard to where they reside.

    — corrected in UNITED STATES v. VAELLO MADERO

  • Argueta-Herandez → Argueta-Hernandez

    See Jimenez-Morales v. Attorney Gen., 821 F. 3d 1307, 1308 (CA11 2016); Garcia v. Sessions, 856 F. 3d 27, 35 (CA1 2017); Bonilla v. Sessions, 891 F. 3d 87, 90, n. 4 (CA3 2018); Argueta-Hernandez, 87 F. 4th, at 706; F. J. A. P., 94 F. 4th, at 635–636; Alonso-Juarez, 80 F. 4th, at 1046; Arostegui-Maldonado v. Garland, 75 F. 4th 1132, 1142–1143 (CA10 2023); Kolov v. Garland, 78 F. 4th 911, 918–919 (CA6 2023).

    — corrected in RILEY v. BONDI and showing the importance of paying close attention to the spelling of names

  • his → her AND he → she

    Judge Johnson dissented in part. In her view, the “egregious . . . pattern of introducing evidence that ha[d] no purpose other than to hammer home that Brenda Andrew is a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad woman . . . trivialize[d] the value of her life in the minds of the jurors.” She would therefore have vacated her sentence.

    — corrected in ANDREW v. WHITE

Commonly Confused and Misspelled Words

Excerpt from The Handbook for the New Legal Writer (3d ed. 2024) by Jill Barton & Rachel H. Smith.

You can be a great legal writer.