Court blawg momentum

In the past few days, Denise, Ernie and Rick have all raised very interesting ideas for using backlinking technologies to connect blawg commentary with court decisions and other legal source news. Now, Ernest Miller of LawMeme, in Why Courts Should Embrace Blawgs, astutely observes: "soon there will be too many blogs for anyone interested in the law to read them all. With trackback technology, judges (and others) would easily be able to keep track of the commentary on a decision they've published on the Internet."

Finally, Ernie comments today that court participation is critical to close the loop. How?

Well, the legal profession needs for courts to use weblogs to issue opinions (in RSS/XML format, and in categories like "civil" "criminal" "domestic" "tax" etc.).  Or it would be nice if the court would issue notices about changes in court procedure in an RSS format.
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Yeah, we need for courts and other government officials to use this technology to give the public information in a timely and meaningful way.  But that's less likely to happen when Wired magazine basically says "blogger uses his blog to error-check a court." 

It's good to have lawyers and technologists of this caliber urging courts to deliver the law via rss/xml. As a public official who has implemented the measures Ernie recommends for one court of last resort, I know from personal experience that court environments can be difficult places to implement new technological ideas. The upside is that I've seen real tangible benefits from using blog technology to deliver public information. I've seen rss.xml feeds appear ranked high in the referrer logs for our official court site, and seen traffic to our court site triple through the various weblog pages I publish. A recent AP story recognized that blogs are good for courts.

I'll keep doing my part to make sure the law is free, including some upcoming modifications to my official court blogs that incorporate backlinking. Meanwhile, I hope to speak to court officials from around the world about this technology at next year's Eighth National Court Technology Conference. Faculty solicitations are due today, and guess what my topic will be?

  11:40:21 AM  [Permanent Link]