Ginsburg, J., dissenting
determining whether existing law should be amended.
The requirement that the statutory portions of the OCGA “shall be merged with annotations,” §1–1–1, does not render the annotations anything other than explanatory, referential, or commentarial material. See Harrison Co. v. Code Revision Comm’n, 244 Ga. 325, 331, 260 S. E. 2d 30, 35 (1979) (observation by the Supreme Court of Georgia that “inclusion of annotations in [the] ‘official Code’ ” does not “give the annotations any official weight”).[1] Annotations aid the legal researcher, and that aid is enhanced when annotations are printed beneath or alongside the relevant statutory text. But the placement of annotations in the OCGA does not alter their auxiliary, nonlegislative character. ***
Because summarizing judicial decisions and commentary bearing on enacted statutes, in contrast to, for example, drafting a committee report to accompany proposed legislation, is not done in a legislator’s law-shaping capacity, I would hold the OCGA annotations copyrightable and therefore reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
- ↑ That the Georgia Supreme Court described the Commission’s work as “within the sphere of legislative authority” for state separation-of-powers purposes, Harrison Co. v. Code Revision Comm’n, 244 Ga. 325, 330, 260 S. E. 2d 30, 34 (1979), does not resolve the federal Copyright Act question before us. Cf. Yates v. United States, 574 U. S. 528, 537 (2015) (plurality opinion) (“In law as in life, … the same words, placed in different contexts, sometimes mean different things.”); Cook, “Substance” and “Procedure” in the Conflict of Laws, 42 Yale L. J. 333, 337 (1933) (“The tendency to assume that a word which appears in two or more legal rules, and so in connection with more than one purpose, has and should have precisely the same scope in all of them, runs all through legal discussions. It has all the tenacity of original sin and must constantly be guarded against.”).
