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Sunday, August 23, 2009
Courts - "Federal Judges Given Guidance on Web Sources"
Mary Pat Gallagher's story in the New Jersey Law Journal, dated August 21st, included these quotes:
Judges, like the rest of us, can be lured by the treasure trove of information on all kinds of topics available on the Web. Now federal judges have a set of guidelines to help them decide when and how to use Internet sources.The Judicial Conference of the United States has sent the chief judge in every federal district five pages of "suggested practices" on the subject.
The guidelines say judges should apply the same criteria to Internet sources as for traditional media -- accuracy, scope of coverage, objectivity, timeliness, authority and verifiability.
Among the questions they should ask: whether the source is peer-reviewed; who publishes it and why; whether the publisher uses editors and fact-checkers; whether the information is reliable and up-to-date; and the sources cited, if any. * * *
The ephemeral nature of the Internet was a prime concern for the guideline writers. "Unlike printed authority, Internet information is often not maintained at a permanent location, and a cited webpage can be changed or deleted at any time," wrote Judicial Conference Secretary Jim Duff in his accompanying cover letter to chief judges on May 22.
"Obviously, this has significant implications for the reliability of citations in court opinions."
Consequently, before citing an Internet page, a judge should take into account whether the information is "stable and likely to remain accessible" via the citation used.
A recent state appeals court decision highlighted the risk of relying on a malleable Web source. In Palisades Collection v. Graubard, A-1338-07, decided April 17, the Appellate Division threw out a judgment in a credit-card collection case because the trial judge took judicial notice of information from Wikipedia that helped trace ownership of the debt in order to establish the plaintiff's standing to sue. Noting that anyone can edit Wikipedia, including a litigant, the appeals court termed it "inherently unreliable."
The federal guidelines recommend capturing a page and attaching it to the opinion if there is reason to believe it will be changed or altered. A captured page should be converted to PDF format with some notation of the date, such as a watermark.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 23, 2009 06:28 PM
Posted to Courts in general