Legal opinions sometimes use Google searches as evidence

This Declan McCullagh story, from News.com.com, describes several cases in which judges used Google searches to support their ruling opinions. The incidents range from testing whether ‘Johnny’s sauce’ is too common a phrase to be copyrighted to researching the effects of secondhand smoke on children. Another one that struck me was a court’s decision that a Sri Lankan film maker who claimed to be famous must not be, since his name returned no hits in a Google search.

May 13, 2004 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. pchuck says:
    May 13, 2004 at 8:45 pm

    Availability of Other Online Sources….
    This comment is important:

    The AOC has no specific guidelines about Internet research done by trial judges. “There’s so much available to them for computerized research that’s in-house, I would think the occasions (for Google searches) are rare,” said AOC’s Carelli.

    Mind you, this story does not indicate that they are doing legal research. It appears they are doing non-legal research. This may open the door to a lot of junk science and other questionable information.

    Appellate judges (on both a state and federal level) have access to lots of other electronic and print materials that are far far superior to Google for legal research as well as non-legal research. Federal trial judges also have access to very good legal and non-legal research materials. State trial judges may be more of a mixed bag.

    Reply
  2. GregS* says:
    May 13, 2004 at 9:16 pm

    Re:Availability of Other Online Sources….
    I would say this is an example of junk science:

    [In a bitter August 2002 dissent, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown upbraided her colleagues for relying on Google when deciding that stun belts should not have been used in a trial. The majority opinion cited newspaper and magazine articles, as well as pieces written by law students, that reported accidental activations of the React stun belt. ]

    But the ‘Johnny’s Sauce’ example seems like a legitimate way of deciding whether something is ‘common’. What’s interesting is the fact that this problem is not new, only that Google is now the most used. They mention Alta Vista being used as a resource in its ‘heyday’. That’s so Zayers.

    Reply

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