'Natural Born' Supreme Court Citations disappear in 2008

[Annette Akerman]

Did Justia.com deliberately aid Barack Obama in 2008 by helping to hide the one legal case that might prevent him from legally qualifying for the presidency?

On October 20, 2011, New Jersey attorney Leo Donofrio accused online legal research behemoth Justia.com of surgically redacting important information from their publication of 25 U.S. Supreme Court opinions which cite Minor v. Happersett, an 1874 decision which arguably contains language that appears to disqualify anyone from presidential eligibility who wasn't born in the country to parents who were citizens.  According to the decision in Happersett:

At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.  (Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 167 [1874])

Justia is a Google Mini-powered website which has singled itself out as one of the most comprehensive and easy-to-search legal sites on the internet.  Other legal resources such as Lexis can cost as much as $5,000 a month for a subscription, and it's impossible to hyperlink to cases which include copyrighted headnotes and analysis.  This is why powerful law firms such as Perkins Coie (where former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer practices law) have cited Justia's pages.

The Wayback Machine, run by InternetArchive.Org, is the means by which the changes made at Justia were documented over time.  Among the first responses from Justia regarding this controversy was to block its Supreme Court Server from being viewed by the Wayback Machine.

Click the following link for an image documenting the pattern of changes made to one of those 25 cases, Luria v. U.S., 231 U.S. 9 (1913).  Notice that the case name "Minor v. Happersett" has been removed, minimizing the case searchability.

The cover-up simply reeks.  While Justia owner Tim Stanley told CNET that there were more cases which had also been "mangled," there is no way to identify how much bogus law was published by Justia over the three-year period in question.  Minor v. Happersett simply disappeared from cases which cited it, minimizing its footprint on the internet at a critical juncture in history — the election of 2008.

McCarthy v. Briscoe, 429 U.S. 1317 (1976)

On Nov. 3, 2008, one day before the election, Donofrio petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the ballots in New Jersey from being used the next day in the case Donofrio v. Wells, claiming that the eligibility of both Obama and McCain had not been verified by the NJ secretary of State as required by law.

In his research, Donofrio had found a reference to McCarthy v. Briscoe, 429 U.S. 1317 (1976), an important precedent which allows the Supreme Court — or even one justice acting alone if an emergency stay is requested — to order a secretary of state to insert a name on the ballot.  The holding of the case implies a reciprocal power to remove names from ballots for the several secretaries of State, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court.

Back in '08, Donofrio couldn't find the in chambers decision anywhere online.  Forced to go old-school, he procured it from a brick-and-mortar law library.  But to this day, McCarthy v. Briscoe remains elusive at Justia.  If you look in their "Volume" database and click "429," all of the in chambers opinions are mysteriously absent. 

In chambers opinions generally begin on pg. 1,301, but not every official volume has them.  For example, Volume 428 has no in chambers opinions, but 429, 434, and 439 do.  Justia's database for Volumes 434 and 439 do exhibit the in chambers opinions, but Volume 429 has them scrubbed.

If you search Justia's Cases & Opinions by Year in 1976, McCarthy v. Briscoe is listed.  There are two cases, an insignificant one-page opinion at page 1,316, followed by the relevant decision on pg. 1,317.  There are links to the preview as well as "Full Text."  However, all of the links are broken, leading back to Justia's front page.

Additionally, Justia's publication of a following 1977 5^th Circuit case, 553 F.2d 1005, includes a hyperlink back to 429 U.S. 1317, and that link is also mysteriously broken.

It would be instructive to track the timeline of changes in the Wayback Machine, but Justia is steadfastly preventing that transparency.  Furthermore, if Justia continues its previous pattern, the links (eg: http://supreme.justia.com/us/429/1317/) will be restored upon publication of this article.  Take your screenshots now.

Go here to follow hyperlinks: http://bwcentral.org/2012/01/thousands-of-federal-workers-owe-back-...

[PHILIP SCHNEIDER]

Man this world is becoming a tangled mass of power brokers.

[LANYON]

Philip:  Google was paid off by Soros and Obama.  Google is behind the internet access and social websites that enabled the mobs of the Arab Spring.... a  concoction between Obama, Samantha Power, Hillary, and Susan Rice (UN) to support the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) UN Project that would aid the Palestinians in case Israel counter-attacked them in retaliation for the HAMAS missile barrages.  So, the finger points in their direction for a good reason.

[PHILIP SCHNEIDER]

HHHmmmmmm . . . . . I wouldn't put it passed the democrat machine to attempt to change printed history. They've gone ahead and hidden Obama's history right in front of our very eyes. What's more astounding though is the media and their (un) willingness to investigate. This point of our society may become more important in our nation's history than the entire 4 years of Obama acting like he's president ie: the day, the year, the election cycle, the media went to sleep . . . . . with the liberal progressive democrat machine.