THE UNREASONABLE EFFECTIVENESS OF SOCIAL MEDIA Benjamin Wilson So you mean that there’s a constitutional right to use Eighth Circuit opinions to its RSS feed daily between Snapchat, but not to use Twitter? 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. And if you’re not familiar with –Justice Elena Kagan1 RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, the Clerk’s Office has you covered. It explains the basics Social media has many well-known foibles. Fake news, for RSS and RSS readers, and gives instructions for bombastic tweets, celebrity gossip, cyber bullying---the following RSS feeds. See “Eighth Circuit RSS Feeds” list goes on. One could even, in a quieter moment of here: www.ca8.uscourts.gov/eighth-circuit-rss-feeds. reflection, question the merits of over two million cat videos on YouTube.2 Nevertheless, we shouldn’t overlook Not only does the Clerk’s Office post the latest opinions, the utility of social media in finding the latest legal news it has separate RSS feeds for oral arguments, new and insights from a variety of sources, including directly briefs filed in the last 30 days, court announcements, from the Eighth Circuit. the Court of Appeals’ argument calendar, and the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel’s argument calendar. You Social media encompasses Internet and smartphone can have all this information delivered to your desktop content that is user-generated and shared with other or smartphone via Feedly, Feedbin, Newsblur, RSSOwl, users. It includes blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and others. Instagram, podcasts, and many other tools. While bar journals and law reviews provide painstakingly thorough Eighth Circuit oral arguments, by the way, are available discussions of legal topics, they cannot compete with here: www.ca8.uscourts.gov/oral-arguments. But did social media’s speed and interactive capabilities. Law you know you can subscribe to them on iTunes? Oral firms, legal-aid organizations, and government offices of arguments are posted and available from almost any all sizes across the world post blog articles and tweets. mobile device. Simply go to iTunes or Podcasts on your device and search for “Eighth Circuit.” The Eighth Circuit itself offers tremendous resources. Appellate attorney Bryan Gividen (@BryanGivi) of Justia (law.justia.com) also maintains a useful Twitter Vinson & Elkins tweeted, If anyone out there works for feed, @US8thCircuitCt, and offers innovative search 8CA’s clerks office, let me say thank you for such great tools. The Twitter side announces opinion summaries summaries of opinions in your RSS feed.3 This led Raffi from the Eighth Circuit. The tweets themselves are Melkonian (@RMFifthCircuit) of Wright & Close limited to the case name, what with only 140 characters to tweet back, Seconded. In the months of waiting for to work with on Twitter, but they link to an opinion Peterson, I have become an aficionado of CA8.4 Kansas summary at Justia where you can get a snapshot of the University Law Professor Corey Rayburn Yung also case and then quickly access the full opinion in PDF tweeted, CA8 has great administrators and has always been directly from the Court. Justia also has various search remarkably well run at least since I clerked there (2004- features under “Search This Case.” While you’re reading 2006).5 Prof. Yung added, I’m just amazed at how well the summary of a specific case, you can click search links CA8 is run given the enormous geographic area covered: on the sidebar that take you to Google Scholar, Google North Dakota through Arkansas.6 Books, and Legal Blogs that may be discussing the same case. Mr. Gividen’s comment about the Eighth Circuit’s RSS feed is well taken. The Clerk’s Office posts all the latest Bar Association of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit SPRING | 2017 THE UNREASONABLE EFFECTIVENESS OF SOCIAL MEDIA Benjamin Wilson When you search Twitter, Facebook, and other social Circuit,” sort the results by date, and voilà, you have a media, one valuable technique is using hashtags. meta-search of the most popular blogs in the country, Hashtags are a word or phrase the author includes including SCOTUSblog, How Appealing, and many within or appends to a post to categorize or label it. It others. Google News (news.google.com) also has a acts as a keyword so the post can be retrieved later via specific blog-search feature. Run your search in Google search, together with other posts on the same topic. The News, then click “Tools,” and a menu item appears that hashtag takes the form of the pound symbol (#) followed allows you to select either “All news” or “Blogs.” Choose by either a single word or a short phrase joined together “Blogs.” Once you’ve done this, you can create a Google into a word; for example, #ThisIsAHashtag. Hashtags News Alert and have this search executed daily, with the have the amazing feature of allowing multiple users, results sent to you via email. from anywhere in the world, who may not know one another, a common way to post and communicate with In the blogosphere I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one another about the same topic. Appellate attorneys, Fault Lines, a blog on the criminal-justice system journalists, and law firms across the country commonly (mimesislaw.com/category/fault-lines), which features use the hashtags #8thCircuit, #EighthCircuit, and #CA8 regular articles by Senior U.S. District Judge Richard when tweeting, blogging, and posting rulings and news G. Kopf. Judge Kopf writes thoughtfully and candidly, about this Circuit. with caustic humor, about his experiences as a judge. He has written recently about compassionate release, a new Blogs are a great resource for learning deeper legal execution protocol in Arizona, a stunning guilty plea in insights and implications of cases. They are generally Omaha, and a “weird and wonderful” crime in Florida. timelier and more dynamic than law journals and law Judge Kopf is top-shelf reading. reviews. However, it can be hard to find blogs with good content that post on a regular basis. In the heart And finally I will pass along a gem. In 2002, the Hon. of our Circuit is On Brief: Iowa’s Appellate Blog (www. Richard S. Arnold gave a talk entitled “The Art of iowaappeals.com/tag/eighth-circuit). On Brief is Judging” at the Eighth Circuit Judicial Conference in hosted by the firm Nyemaster Goode and is an excellent Duluth, Minnesota. The United States Courts maintains source of news from the Eighth Circuit. The most its own channel on YouTube and has posted the full- frequent author, Rox Laird, is a former reporter from the length video of Judge Arnold’s talk (www.youtube.com/ Des Moines Register. His articles are brisk, topical, and a watch?v=Z_XO4FadiiE). That talk was delivered three pleasure to read. years before YouTube even existed, yet it found its way there. Social media has preserved Judge Arnold’s talk and The most efficient way to scour blogs for Eighth Circuit is making it available today to billions of people across news is to search them all at once. Justia features a site the globe. Indeed, more information is freely available called BlawgSearch with an appellate category. You can now than has ever been available in the history of collect the most popular appellate law blogs on one mankind. For that I can excuse a few million cat videos. page and search all of them. Try searching “Eighth Bar Association of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit SPRING | 2017 .