The Death of Twentieth-Century Authority
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THE DEATH OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY AUTHORITY * Michael Whiteman INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 27 I.TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY FADES ........................................................................................... 29 A. A Shift Away From the Old....................................................................................... 30 B. Lifting the Veil ............................................................................................................ 32 C. The Disappearing Act................................................................................................. 33 D. Authentication............................................................................................................ 37 II.THE RISE OF NEW SOURCES OF AUTHORITY.......................................................................... 41 A. Cautious Acceptance of New Authority................................................................... 42 B. Changes to the Secondary Sources Guard ................................................................ 47 C. Hatching the New Authority: Wikipedia as an Example of the New.................... 48 1. Disdain for Wikipedia......................................................................................... 50 2. The Growing Acceptance of Wikipedia........................................................... 52 D. Judicial Notice and the New Authority .................................................................... 53 III.AFTER DEATH, WHERE TO NOW?.......................................................................................... 59 A. The Democratic Effect of the Internet ...................................................................... 60 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................63 Authority: A legal writing taken as definitive or decisive; esp., a judicial or administrative decision cited as a precedent.1 “Respect Ma Authoritah!”2 INTRODUCTION The case of Bush v. Gore3 stands out as the seminal decision that decided the disputed presidential election of 2000. For legal researchers, it was a herald of a different sort. With the citation in the per curiam opinion to an online newspaper article,4 Bush v. Gore fired the first salvo * Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Law Library Services and Information Technology at Northern Kentucky University Chase College of Law. This Article was first presented at the 2010 American Association of Law Schools’ Annual Meeting. 1. BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY 142–43 (8th ed. 2004). 2. South Park: Chickenlover (Comedy Central television broadcast May 20, 1998) (paraphrasing COOL HAND LUKE (Warner Bros. 1967)). With thanks to Kris Franklin for first quoting this. Kris Franklin, The Rhetorics of Legal Authority Constructing Authoritativeness, the “Ellen Effect,” and the Example of Sodomy Law, 33 RUTGERS L.J. 49, 49 n.1 (2001). 3. 531 U.S. 98 (2000). 4. The Court cites to “Ho, More Than 2M Ballots Uncounted, AP Online (Nov. 28, 2000).” Id. at 103. Thanks to Kent Olson, Director of Reference, Research, and Instruction at the University of Virginia Law Library for suggesting this as the tipping point for the death analogy. 27 28 58 UCLA LAW REVIEW DISCOURSE 27 (2010) in the death of twentieth-century authority.5 While courts in the past relied on a select group of print resources, legal researchers today are mov- ing towards a more internet-based research platform. This Article will focus on the shift from traditional print-based authority to a more online and democratic6 way of using authority to create law.7 There are still pitfalls in this new world, but the death of tra- ditional authority can be seen with some cautious optimism, because it allows practitioners to choose from a much larger base of authority than what used to be available. This shift in authority is not new.8 In the twentieth century, courts shifted away from just using judicial opinions as their only authority and started using the growing number of regulations and statutes.9 And in the twenty-first century, the shift is happening within the broader realm of secondary authority. The reliance on traditional sources such as legal encyclopedias and law reviews is giving way to citation to blogs,10 Wikipedia articles,11 and other general web sources. Does this mean that these new sources of authority should be ignored or derided? The answer 5. One of the first instances of the U.S. Supreme Court citing to the internet was in the 1996 case of Denver Area Education Telecommunications Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, 518 U.S. 727, 777 n.4 (1996). 6. The internet provides everyone with an opportunity to access legal information in a relatively cost-free manner. This broader access will allow more people to have input into how our laws are used and how they are made. 7. It is inevitable that this trend will continue, at least because the overwhelming majority of Americans are using the internet. Seventy-nine percent of all Americans are internet users. Pew Internet & American Life Project, Internet Adoption, http://www.pewinternet.org/Trend-Data/Internet- Adoption.aspx (last visited June 28, 2010). This number has risen rapidly over the past ten years. Id. (finding that in March of 2000, only 40 percent of Americans reported using the internet). 8. In one study that looked at the citation practice in U.S. Supreme Court opinions over the last one hundred years, it found that the trend was already occurring, albeit slowly, as far back as 1899. See Robert C. Berring, Legal Information and the Search for Cognitive Authority, 88 CAL. L. REV. 1673, 1683– 91 (2000). In 1899, the Court was primarily citing to the traditional primary sources of law: cases and statutes. See id. at 1683–87. Even back then, the Court still cited to a small number of secondary sources. See id. at 1686–87. But the Court’s citation practice radically changed over the twentieth century; by 1999, the Court was citing to a plethora of secondary sources, including historical treatises, law journal articles, and other academic papers. See id. at 1688–91. 9. See Paul Douglas Callister, Beyond Training: Law Librarianship’s Quest for the Pedagogy of Legal Research Education, 95 LAW LIBR. J. 7, 21–22 (2003). 10. According to the Law Blog Metrics, up through August 2006 there have been thirty-two judicial opinions in which legal blogs have been cited. Law X.0, Cases Citing Legal Blogs—Updated List (Aug. 6, 2006), http://3lepiphany.typepad.com/3l_epiphany/2006/08/cases_citing_le.html. 11. See Noam Cohen, Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 29, 2007, at C3. See generally Lee F. Peoples, The Citation of Wikipedia in Judicial Opinions, 12 YALE J.L. & TECH. 1 (2009). The Death of Twentieth-Century Authority 29 is clearly no, for the people who create this new authority are the new generation of lawyers, law students, experts, and judges.12 This Article will explore the death of twentieth-century authority. First, this Article traces the shift away from traditional authority. It outlines some of the problems associated with this shift, including the disappearance of online sources after their use and the trouble with the authentication of online legal materials. Second, I examine what these new authorities are, and I consider the growing use of these new sources, including the varied reactions from the courts. Finally, this Article concludes with a look at the positive impact that these new sources of authority are having on the judicial system. I. TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY FADES The legal world is based on a set of stable and (at times) easily dis- cernable legal precedents that enable those who research the law to, in theory, understand what it means. The notion of stare decisis is based on the theory that future courts should look back to previous cases to keep order and stability in the legal system.13 This predictable structure enables human beings to act within the boundaries of societal norms. For this stability to occur, decisionmakers have to agree upon a standardized set of authoritative legal authorities. Legal authority has always been evolving. The Ten Command- ments, Hammurabi’s Code, the Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitution, and the judicial decisions form the basis of the common law. These sources 12. Judges have already begun blogging. See, e.g., Gary Becker & Richard Posner, THE BECKER- POSNER BLOG, http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner (last visited Aug. 31, 2010); see also Jonathan Saltzman, Off the Bench, Judge Blogs Her Mind, BOSTON GLOBE, May 27, 2008, at A1. 13. See BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY 1443 (8th ed. 2004). Moreover, this order and stability will keep society from drowning in anarchy. Ironically, Grant Gilmore, paraphrasing Justice Holmes, had a more ominous view of the law’s role in society: Law reflects but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society. The values of a reasonably just society will reflect themselves in a reasonably just law. The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. The values of an unjust society will reflect themselves in an unjust law. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticu- lously observed. GRANT GILMORE, THE AGES OF AMERICAN LAW 110–11 (1977). 30 58 UCLA LAW REVIEW DISCOURSE 27 (2010) gained