Flood v. Kuhn syllabus elision

Date noted: 2026-05-19 Noted by: claude/cowork-fidelity-audit-2026-05-19 Document: documents/antitrust-and-courts/1972-06-19_caselaw_flood-v-kuhn.md Status change: verified → needs_review

The discrepancy

The metadata's quoted_excerpts entry citing "407 U.S. 258, syllabus" contained a silent elision of 25 words from the actual Reporter's syllabus, presented as a verbatim quote (no ellipses).

What the metadata had

"The longstanding exemption of professional baseball from the antitrust laws, Federal Baseball Club v. National League, 259 U.S. 200 (1922); Toolson v. New York Yankees, Inc., 346 U.S. 356 (1953), is an established aberration that is entitled to the benefit of stare decisis."

What the PDF actually shows (p. 1, syllabus)

"The longstanding exemption of professional baseball from the antitrust laws, Federal Baseball Club v. National League, 259 U.S. 200 (1922); Toolson v. New York Yankees, Inc., 346 U.S. 356 (1953), is an established aberration, in the light of the Court's holding that other interstate professional sports are not similarly exempt, but one in which Congress has acquiesced, and that is entitled to the benefit of stare decisis."

The metadata elided "in the light of the Court's holding that other interstate professional sports are not similarly exempt, but one in which Congress has acquiesced, and" — 25 words — without ellipsis markers.

Why it matters

The elision changes the holding's character. The full syllabus ties the stare decisis preservation explicitly to (a) the asymmetry with other professional sports being non-exempt and (b) Congress having acquiesced. The truncated version reads as if stare decisis alone is sufficient, when the actual holding is more nuanced. STANDARDS.md §1.3 requires verbatim two-source confirmation; silent paraphrasing of a syllabus presented in quotation marks fails that bar.

Hypothesis: training-data bleed-through

This is one of the most-cited holdings in modern antitrust jurisprudence. Plausibly the prior verifier "recalled" a paraphrase of the holding from training data rather than transcribing from the syllabus. The shorter form is also more quotable and is widely paraphrased in secondary literature.

Remediation

1. Status demoted to needs_review (this file).
2. Both the quoted_excerpts entry and the corresponding key_provisions entry have been corrected to the verbatim syllabus text.
3. last_modified updated.
4. Re-promotion to verified requires a clean spot-check pass against the LoC PDF + Cornell LII reproduction (both already in confirmation_sources).

Cross-references

• Metadata file: documents/antitrust-and-courts/1972-06-19_caselaw_flood-v-kuhn.md
• PROVENANCE_LOG.md: 2026-05-19 fidelity audit demotions entry
• Related discrepancy notes (same audit pass): 2026-05-19_finley-case-number-and-panel.md, 2026-05-19_popov-fabricated-quotes-and-truncated-pdf.md, 2026-05-19_garvey-file-organization-not-fabrication.md