has been posted to SSRN and can be downloaded

Abstract:     
Wikipedia has been cited in over four hundred American judicial opinions. Courts have taken judicial notice of Wikipedia content, based their reasoning on Wikipedia entries, and decided dispositive motions on the basis of Wikipedia content. The impermanent nature of Wikipedia entries and their questionable quality raises a number of unique concerns. To date, no law review article has comprehensively examined the citation of Wikipedia in judicial opinions or considered its long-range implications for American law.

This article reports the results of an exhaustive study examining every American judicial opinion that cites a Wikipedia entry. The article begins with a discussion of cases that cite Wikipedia for a significant aspect of the case before the court. The impact of these citations on litigants’ constitutional and procedural rights, the law of evidence, judicial ethics, and the judicial role in the common law adversarial system are explored. Part II discusses collateral references to Wikipedia entries. Part III proposes a set of best practices for when and how Wikipedia should be cited. Detailed statistics on the quality of Wikipedia entries cited in judicial opinions and the completeness and accuracy of citations to Wikipedia entries are provided. The article concludes with a discussion of the impact of Wikipedia citations in judicial opinions on the future of the law.

Cheers, Shaunna

In case you missed it, there is a post with links to a recently released University of Victoria Law Student Technology Survey at Slaw http://www.slaw.ca/2010/03/20/uvic-law-student-technology-survey/

I expect the results for law students from other schools would be similar.  These are the students who are coming to Head Start and our firms and organizations.  What a difference a decade makes!

Cheers,

Shaunna

On August 31, 2009 I posted a note about a problem with the LawSource Cases template citation search box.  The 'Find' box did not require punctuation (CLR) but the Cases template did (C.L.R.)  As of this past weekend Carswell has added a line beneath the Citation box that reads: Exact punctuation required.  This should help users understand how to correctly input searches to secure correct results. 

Thanks goes out to Carol Morgan and everyone at Carswell who put this on the 'to do list', monitored it and let us know when it was fixed.

Josette McEachern