by Raizel Liebler
The Supreme Court is well known to be slow to change; however, they just posted a change to their website that will hopefully solve the issues raised in Supreme Court opinion link rot. I am so pleased that my co-written article, Something Rotten in the State of Legal Citation: The Life Span of a United States Supreme Court Citation Containing an Internet Link (1996-2010), 15 Yale J.L. & Tech. 273 (2013) as well as the perma.cc project based on the research of Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert & Lawrence Lessig in Harvard Law Review Forum has led to this change!
The Supreme Court states:
The Court’s Office of Information Technology is collaborating with the Library, the Reporter of Decisions’ Office, and the Clerk’s Office to preserve web-based content cited in Court opinions. To address the problem of “link rot,” where internet material cited in Court opinions may change or cease to exist, web-based content included in Court opinions from the 2005 Term forward is being made available on the Court’s website. Hard copies will continue to be retained in the case files by the Clerk’s Office. See “Internet Sources Cited in Opinions.”