Please note that these materials are provided for historical purposes only. The information presented is out of date and may be neither accurate nor useful. External hyperlinks may no longer be valid. For current court technology information, please see the new Court Technology Bulletin.
September/October 1996 Volume 8 Number 5
You Can Get There From Here
The on-ramp to the information superhighway can be a treacherous route. To help your court find its way, the National Center for State Courts has produced the Information Superhighway Implementation Guidelines, a guide to getting on the Internet. The following excerpt explains some court-specific concerns when connecting a court to the Internet.
Official Voice
Courts need to remember that information and messages sent over the Internet are viewed as official court communications. The general informality of the Internet encourages people to send e-mail and publish information over the World Wide Web without subjecting it to the same scrutiny to which paper-based information is subjected. People say things in e-mail that they would never say in a printed letter. E-mail is not usually as formal as paper correspondence. Still, court personnel need to remember that e-mail messages reflect on the image of the court. Messages should not contain information that would not be appropriate in a normal letter. A good rule of thumb is to assume that every time you send an e-mail message, the worst possible person will eventually see it. This might be your boss, chief judge, or even the media.
The same problem exists for the World Wide Web. A court’s Web pages reflect on that court just as its Annual Report does. Courts do not let people add material to Annual Reports without any review. Similarly, they should not allow people to place information on the World Wide Web without a review process.
While these concerns are important for any organization, courts rely heavily on legislative bodies for funding, as well as on the public’s trust. Poorly managed Web sites and inaccurate or inappropriate e-mail could have devastating consequences if they undermine the support of either the legislature or the public.
Security
While security is a concern for all organizations on the Internet, it is especially important for the courts. In most organizations, if someone circumvents security and gains access to private records, only time and money are lost. In comparison, compromised court records can create a host of problems:
- Criminal records may be affected, conceivably detaining innocent people or letting the guilty go free, possibly affecting constitutional rights.
- Sealed information may be revealed, affecting ongoing trials, again possibly affecting constitutional rights to privacy.
- Legislature’s trust may be lessened, affecting funding.
- Public trust may be lessened, affecting the courts’ ability to effectively administer justice.
Fortunately, there are many methods for securing your site, as well as securing communications via e-mail. In many ways, computer data is more secure than paper files.
Document Formatting
Perhaps more than any other body, the courts are concerned with the format of documents. Briefs must be in a certain format, with the right color cover, bound in a certain way. Opinions and orders begin with a case title and party information followed by the text of the opinion or order, usually formatted into two columns. Cites to opinions must be in Blue book format and must point to an exact page number in a specified printed version.
Some of this formatting can be difficult to replicate properly in an on-line format. While centering text is easy on World Wide Web pages, formatting text into multiple columns is much more difficult. Traditional page numbers make no sense in the context of World Wide Web pages. A “page” on the Web can be a sentence long, or it can run on for thousands of paragraphs. There are no traditional page breaks. This makes it difficult to cite to an on-line opinion. Although lawyers can read opinions on-line, they still may need to refer to a printed source in order to accurately cite parts of that case. Both the American Bar Association and the American Association of Law Librarians are working on these problems.
Privacy Concerns
One consequence of modern technology is the decrease in privacy concerning personal information. Most court records are public information. However, it has traditionally been quite difficult to find personal information among the large amounts of case information generated every year. If you wanted to find out what legal troubles your neighbors have had, you could go down to the courthouse and spend days searching through the records. Few people are willing to do this. So, while court records were technically public, they were effectively private. Technology changes this situation by allowing people to search easily through large amounts of information. If the court’s opinions are available and searchable on-line, neighbors only need to type in a name to see cases involving that person. However, recognize that this type of data has also been collected by private marketing and credit database companies for many years.
The full Information Superhighway Implementation Guidelines is available in both printed and electronic form. To request a copy, contact Technology Services at (888) 846-6746. The hypertext version of the guidelines is also available on the National Center for State Courts’ World Wide Web site at http://www.ncsc.dni.us/ncsc/isig/guide.htm (This link is no longer valid. The text of the link remains for historical reference.).
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