I was reading Justice Kennedy's
decision yesterday in
Granholm v. Heald, in which the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot allow in-state wineries to ship directly to consumers while at the same time banning out-of-state wineries from doing likewise. (OK, it's true, I have no life.) Anyway, as I started reading the introductory fact section, I was struck by what seemed like an unusual number of cites to the internet -- three in the first couple of pages, to be exact. (More after the jump...)
Now, three may not sound like a lot, but trust me, internet cites are not terribly favored in legal briefs and, certainly, not in judicial opinions. I did a couple of years clerking and I think maybe --
maybe -- we used them once or twice. This, I grant you, is changing somewhat, as more and more reliable sources get put onto the internet (along with more unreliable ones, as well). But it's not just Luddite tradition among judges. Usually, if you want to cite to facts, those facts had to be proven in court, so a factual cite is usually to the record, or maybe to the parties' briefs (if they agreed on the facts, for example).
Anyway, three seemed like a lot to me, although it's in a section just giving a general overview of the US wine industry, so it doesn't really matter much. And then I remembered that this is the first opinion by Justice Kennedy since Tom Delay launched his utterly bizarro attack on Kennedy for "doing his own research on the internet" <Gasp!> And so I have to believe this is a little shout-out by Kennedy to his buddy Tom. And one of those cites is even to the Cato Institute website, a fave of Tom's I'm sure. Maybe Tom will see the joys of Supreme Court Justices doing internet research after all.