At the suggestion of Rick, I’ve decided to start my very first thread, on the issue of publication of judicial opinions, or non-publication as the case may be.
My beef is this. With the cost to government of publishing information on the internet being substantially less than on hard copy, there is no reason not to publish every single decision of the courts so that people can cite all of them in the future.
Currently only certain cases qualify for publication, leading to two standards of justice. Short sloppy and not necessarily correct decisions on nine out of ten cases and well written decisions on about a tenth of them (not necessarily correct either) that people can rely on in the future. I’ve seen some weird and unjust results in unpublished opinions and I don’t read all that many.
Guessing this will be moved to Great Debates or, at least, IMHO…
First, aren’t the vast majority of unpublished opinions mere applications of existing law to unique facts? If so, why should they be published, since they are mere restatements of existing law? As precedent, they have no particular value.
Second, when we start talking about hundreds of thousands of opinions (which we would be, in short order) is the cost really so minimal? We’re talking about maintaining a huge web repository with enough bandwidth to allow thousands of attorneys to search and access them simultaneously.
I agree that there should be no restrictions on which opinions can be cited–any case published in an official reporter or a private source (e.g. Westlaw, Lexis, legal newspapers, etc.) should be valid precedent assuming all the other rules of stare decisis apply. However, there is no reason the gov’t should have to publish every single opinion issued by every judge…