Scholarship @ GEORGETOWN LAW

This panel is devoted to examining the issue of the reliability of legal documents uploaded to blogs. From Newsweek’s posting of the “Torture Memos” to SCOTUSBlog’s postings of Supreme Court briefs, news agencies and bloggers regularly upload legal documents to support their stories. Although these web sites and blogs are often the only sources for these documents, few electronic documents have any verifiable proof of reliability. Future researchers wanting to rely on these documents must be aware of this issue and must be able to confirm that the posted document is complete and unaltered from the version authorized for publication by the author. This panel discusses this issue and the current standards for proving the authenticity of a document in order to foster a system for preserving the value of blogs and documents found on blogs for future researchers.