On April 3 the Iowa Supreme Court issued its opinion in the gay marriage case. Within four hours, 1.56 million unique users had accessed the court’s Web site. That’s an extraordinary number of hits for any site but for that many people to access a 65 page opinion that’s an incomprehensible number.
I will take it as a given that not all of these people read the opinion or even much of it, but if only 5% did, that is probably more people than have read Marbury v. Madison in 200 years.
It is of some note that in reading the opinion, the Iowa court clearly was aware that the opinion would be controversial and of interest to the general public. It went to unusual lengths to deliver an accessible opinion and certainly that is a public good. But maybe there is something more here.
Obviously access to primary law materials has increased dramatically with the Internet. And I am told by an authority on the subject that the number of legal journalists is declining with some speed. They are being replaced to some degree by bloggers but those tend to be niche, lawyer-oriented and lacking in access to the parties or lawyers.
So we have an increasing public access to judicial opinions and a decrease in the skilled mediators who can explain those opinions to a lay audience. That’s a bad situation. I wonder, and I toss it out in particular to any judges who might be out there, if this will change the way courts write opinions – at least in major cases.
Opinions were once written for the parties and now are written for the bar and bench.
But if the biggest audience is the general public (in a class of cases) should courts or legal publishers take cognizance of this and how would they do that?
Denis Hauptly
Vice President, Technology Strategy
Thomson Reuters Global Resources
Posted by Denis Hauptly in:
In Practice | Practice trends |
