Supreme Court update

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: May 27, 2008

By way of updating the I-would-like-to-get-a-copy-of-a-State-Supreme-Court-ruling-but-I-don’t-have-$200 saga, I called the Court this morning and spoke with a nice gentleman who told me that although the Court does not make rulings freely available online, he would be happy to look up the case and copy the records (for a fee, of course) so I could pick them up in Montgomery.

But I’m not in Montgomery, I said.

No problem, he said; he can mail or fax them (for an additional fee, of course). I just need to provide him with the “styling” of the case, he said.

(“Case styling” is just fancy lawyer-speak for who’s suing whom.)

Well, I don’t have the styling, but it’s the ruling that stayed the Board of Education’s double-dipping ban, I said.

He needs the styling to search for it, he said.

I don’t have the styling; I only know the subject matter of the case. And since I’m not an attorney, I don’t have access to Lexis-Nexis/Westlaw-type databases that would give me the styling from the subject matter.

But wait! I know when the ruling came down. Maybe that would help? It was released on Friday, I said.

No dice. Still need the styling to look it up, he said. Maybe the State Law Library could help.

I thanked him and hung up.

The bottom line is that while, apparently, laypeople can get copies of the rulings for a “nominal” fee, the system to access them is labyrinthine, at best. The nice guy at the Supreme Court, the folks at the State Law Library ... none of them would have to hold my hand through this process if the Court would just make the rulings available on the Internet, like everyone around us has already figured out how to do.

I would just like to point out that in the time it took me to make that single phone call this morning, I could have accessed and printed 15-20 rulings from state supreme courts of our neighbors.

Online.

For free.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), we have one Supreme Court seat up for election this year. It’s the one occupied by Associate Justice Harold See.

I feel a campaign issue coming on. How about you?