Posted by Stuart Benjamin:
Maybe some typist has a sense of humor:
I'm going to be teaching Cohen v. California tomorrow (the case
reversing a conviction for wearing a jacket that said "Fuck the
Draft"), and I decided to see if Cohen was the earliest iteration of
"fuck" in a Supreme Court opinion. (It was.) I then looked up "shit"
to see if it appeared earlier in the Supreme Court, according to
Westlaw. The answer is yes, but only because of a scrivenor's error.
The Westlaw report of Galveston, H. & S.A. Ry. Co. v. Gonzales, 151
U.S. 496 (1894) contains this doozy of a typo:
"The jurisdiction common to all the circuit courts of the United
States in respect to the subject-matter of the suit and the
character of the parties who might sustain shits in those courts is
described in the section ..."
I do not know, of course, whether the typist made this error
intentionally. It was probably just an accident, but it's more amusing
to imagine a typist with a sense of humor (or just boredom).
By the way, for those who care: the first case that intentionally
included the word "shit" was Eaton v. City of Tulsa, 415 U.S. 697
(1974).
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