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Friday, August 18, 2006

Courts - Authentication of e-government documents in the courts

My most recent Res Gestae article, "The General Assembly's role in making Indiana rules and statutes available to the public," published in the current July/August 2006 issue and also accessible via this link, lists a number of concerns about the General Assembly's custodianship of the Indiana statutes and rules, including this paragraph:

With a printed volume of the Acts of Indiana, or the Indiana Code, what is on a page will stay the same, forever. You do not have to worry that a page of the Acts of 1941 has been changed, inadvertently or intentionally. You cannot say the same about the current online documents. It is hard to see how a court could take judicial notice of such material.
Perhaps in reference to this, I received an email this afternoon from an Indiana law librarian, enclosing a request posted on a national list-serv by a counterpart in California:
I am writing an article about authentication of e-government documents in the courts. For the article, I am looking for anecdotes, at the trial court level, where an attorney has offered into evidence some documentary evidence of the law – a case, statute, regulation, agency publication, et cetera - from an online source, and had the court (or opposing counsel) refuse to accept the document unless an “authentic” or “official” version was proffered. If you have any examples of this occurring, I would really appreciate hearing about it.

I would also like to send this question to several attorney list- servs, to reach attorneys who do not have librarians. If any of your attorneys subscribe to list-servs for the California Bar Association litigation section, the ABA litigation section, or the ATLA , and you think they would be receptive to a request to post my question on their list-servs, please let me know.

Thanks in advance – I know there are interesting stories out there!

Reference Librarian
University of California - Hastings College of the Law

I've deleted the librarian's name and email, as I don't have her permission, but if you have comments for her, let me know and I will send them on.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 18, 2006 03:48 PM
Posted to Courts in general