Supreme Court Says It’s Resigned to ‘Linkrot’
By Jacob Gershman
Wall Street Journal
September 26, 2013, 4:11 PM
Linkrot sounds like what happened to the leftover Memorial Day hot dogs in Law Blog’s fridge.
But it also refers to the problem of broken links on old web pages, an irritating but inevitable part of the online circle of life. It’s a malady that afflicts not only film-review aggregators and blogs but even U.S. Supreme Court opinions.
Since 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court has included more than 500 links to online material in its opinions. According to a new Harvard study, half of the URLs embedded in the opinions no longer work. The authors of the paper — Harvard law and computer science professor Jonathan Zittrain and law student Kendra Albert — suggest a “permalink” solution. They’re developing a site, perma.cc, that allow users, including Supreme Court clerks, to archive a website and access it with a new everlasting URL.
Law Blog reached out to a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court, Kathy Arberg, about the idea. The response? No opinion.
But on the general issue of linkrot, Ms. Arberg said, “The Court prefers to cite printed materials rather than materials available only on the Internet, precisely because of their transient nature. Where citation to Internet materials is unavoidable, the Court captures the page and includes it in the case file within the Clerk’s Office.”
The case file isn’t available online. But at least you can still literally link to the cited material — albeit via an Amtrak train to Washington, D.C.
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