The Court relied on the case of Banks v. Manchester (1888), in which the Supreme Court articulated the government edicts doctrine by finding that "there can be no copyright in the opinions of the judges, or in the work done by them in their official capacity as judges", and a report from the Copyright Office noting that "the judicially established rule... still prevent[s] copyright in the text of state laws... and similar official documents". The Court also identified three factors that would determine whether authorship in a work is constrictively attributable to that of the people, namely: the identity of the public official who created the work; the nature of the work; and the process by which the work was produced. As a result the Court stated that the people are "constructive authors" of the law and judges and legislators are merely draftsman that are exercising authority delegated to them. Thus, the court found that "the annotations in the OCGA, while not having the force of law, are part and parcel of the law. They are so enmeshed with Georgia's law as to be inextricable... They are therefore uncopyrightable". The state assembly of Georgia appealed this decision to the United States Supreme Court. Both PRO and the state of Georgia urged the Supreme Court to grant certiorari to the government's appeal; on June 24, 2019, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case (No. 18-1150). The Court heard oral arguments in the case on December 2, 2019. Decision The Court accepted the case to decide the question:Whether the government edicts doctrine extends to—and thus renders uncopyrightable—works that lack the force of law, such as the annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated. Oral arguments were held on December 2, 2019, at which many of the justices focused on the role of the legislature in approving the annotated statutes for publication, questioning whether this made the annotations equivalent to legislation, which cannot be copyrighted. On April 27, 2020, the Court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision, that Georgia does not have copyright over its annotated legal code. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion, joined by Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh: he noted that, binding law or not, official works of the Georgia legislature could not be copyrighted, as they could deprive citizens of knowledge of those laws and their corollaries. Justice Ruth Bader