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Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Law - "Appellate court begins to put 'unpublished' rulings on Web"

"Appellate court begins to put 'unpublished' rulings on Web." In New Jersey!

Some quotes from this story in The Star-Ledger, the Voice of New Jersey (minor registration requirement):

Each year New Jersey appeals courts issue about 3,800 decisions, but only a tenth of them are published in the law books and on the judiciary's Web site.

By law, the rest are still public documents. In practice, it is next to impossible for anyone other than the lawyers handling those cases and reporters at the Statehouse to find them. For the rest of the public, they might as well be secret.

That is about to change. Today the judiciary is scheduled to begin posting its "unpublished" decisions on its official Web site, making them available worldwide via the Internet. * * *

The "unpublished" rulings will still have a decidedly second-class status. Published appeals court rulings are the law of the state and every trial judge must follow them. Unpublished rulings decide a particular case but set no legal precedent. Judges are free to ignore them. [same in Indiana]

That two-tiered system developed decades ago when state appeals courts decided that if they were not selective about what they published, library bookshelves and the law itself would collapse under the accumulated weight.

But unpublished opinions are often newsworthy in their own right. Lawyers also can use them to try to sway a judge, provided they play fair. They cannot pick the unpublished rulings that help their case and ignore others that hurt it.

Stern said some big or specialized firms with the time and money stockpile unpublished rulings affecting their particular area of the law.

"This way, everybody has equal access and they can keep whatever they choose to keep," Stern said. * * *

Ronald Chen, an associate dean at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, said, "The more access to judicial reasoning, whether they call it published or unpublished, the better."

About 80% of the Indiana Court of Appeals opinions are Not for Publication. Until a few weeks ago, it was difficult even to timely locate the names of the NFP rulings. Without the name, one could not request a copy of an opinion or look it up in the docket. Thanks to an arrangement with the Clerk of the Indiana Courts, the ILB is now hosting the Clerk's weekly list of the NFP opinions. That is "Step 1" in Indiana.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 20, 2005 03:19 PM
Posted to General Law Related