A post earlier this month by Aaron Swartz raises legitimate questions about how citizens can best be informed when courts announce decisions. Swartz pointed to Cornell University's e-mail syllabus announcement service, which is a good resource, but limited to the US Supreme Court. I run a similar e-mail opinion summary service here at the WV Supreme Court, which is very popular among citizens and lawyers alike. And we have the RSS feeds (1, 2, 3, 4) and official court weblogs (1, 2, 3, 4) where new decisions are announced.

But most courts don't have RSS feeds, so citizens have to simply watch news reports, know which web page to check (either a court site or a specialized appellate litigation site like How Appealing), or which clerk's office to call. All of which seems inefficient.

How can we do it better? I have two ideas. First, courts can agree with Jon Udell, that is, begin to act like XML is for the rest of us, and publish XML opinions directly to the web using a standard definition of elements for court documents. Within that XML document, courts could incorporate standard topical information, such as the codes used by the State Supreme Court Data Project, to categorize the topical information in court decisions. This topical markup would allow machine processing and discovery of court decisions relating to a specific topic.

Second, I wonder if the capabilities of RSS aggregation could be exploited at the case information level. For example, I could modify our case management system to output an RSS file each day that contains item-level data corresponding to each item on the docket sheets commonly used by court clerks to describe the progress of a court case. (e.g., here's the US Supreme Court's docket sheet for Eldred.) Citizens and lawyers could subscribe to that case's RSS feed to be informed about important filings or actions by the court. If the feed contained some top-level topical information, it may also be possible to implement auto-discovery. (e.g. run a search for pending cases related to free speech.)

I've seen the tangible benefits courts can reap from using self-publishing technology, including RSS, and I hope these benefits can continue. Perhaps the real technologists out there (I'm only a lawyer, after all) could let me know if I'm on the right track.