The South Dakota Unified Justice System still hasn’t delivered on producing an easily accessible system for accessing state court documents online ($20 per search? Come on! Electrons don’t cost that much.) But the South Dakota Supreme Court is at least improving the speed of its publication of its opinions. Bob Mercer reports that instead of waiting until Thursday of each week to publish its opinions and mail them to the parties involved, the Court will now e-mail opinions to the attorneys of record at 8 a.m. on release day, then give them two hours to break the news to their clients before posting the opinion at 10 a.m. on the UJS website. In return for the favor of instant early delivery instead of the bummer of seeing the opinion first released to the press and public online and waiting a couple days for the Court’s ruling to arrive in the mail, the court “expects” counsel to embargo the released rulings for those two hours.
The Supreme Court is also turning to e-mail instead of postal mail to notify counsel of record and affected judges of any orders entered. Alas for the postal service, but hooray for a little faster service from the Supreme Court.
20 Dollars per search…..my birth certificate from Dell Rapids only cost 15. My sister is 18 years older than I am so you never know….supreme courts always move slow with technology, our national one doesn’t want anyone to catch them napping. If you loosen up just a little bit then judges who haven’t talked in years will start yapping.
Well…it is time the Court joined the present century in communications policy. The current system (and the 20 bucks) was implemented to effect attorneys and, I hope, not the Press. I understand the need to respect the rights of the parties in the court case.