WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court opinions are rarely susceptible to the kind of fact-checking that reporters usually employ on politics. But Justice Antonin Scalia’s hearty dissent in an environmental case this week contained such a glaring error of fact — misreporting an earlier case in which Scalia himself wrote the majority opinion — that the justice changed the opinion. The court quietly posted the corrected version on its website without notice.
With the flourish that is typical of his prose, Scalia launched a lengthy attack on the Environmental Protection Agency and his colleagues on the court who ruled that the EPA has the authority to put in place a regulation aimed at reducing air pollution from power plants that the wind carries into other states. Scalia took the unusual step of reading a summary of his dissent in court Tuesday.
