Arkansas Blog

Can you give us more details on this judicial edict, please?

ARK. BLOG: More to come later, but all criminal and civil court filings are not being placed on-line. A variety of exceptions are a result of chief Judge Vann Smith's interpretation of relatively new Supreme Court rules on on-line filings. It's put a number of things readily available to public inspection off-limits except if you present yourself in the clerk's office (where a file may or may not be available at the time you appear.)

I didn't look at the criminal docket but it would appear that the civil docket is online although the domestic relations docket is limited to the docket entries themselves.

I had some free time yesterday and was able to confirm the rumored financial misdeeds of any number of people. It was very interesting and I didn't have to go to the Courthouse.

I wish the city would get in the 21st Century. One thing I'd like to see is a place where you can go online and look up those Conditional Use and Zoning Variances that you see all over the place that tell you to contact the city for more information. That kind of thing should be online so that you can call it up and see what is being planned in your area.

Max incorrectly claims "Any argument that there's some special quality to on-line access that justifies censorship falls to the argument that a public record is a public record."

That's just not so. People effectively had a certain amount of privacy because it was difficult to pore through every record in a written set of files. That privacy is now gone, probably forever, absent some reasonable regulatory action.

Would that be censorship? I don't think so. Censorship has to do with the right to publish, usually by non-governmental actors, not with the obligation to publish by governmental actors.

How could what Max proposes be abused? Suppose someone committed a crime early in life which was later expunged from the judicial record. If those records are on-line and easily, automatically available, then while that expungement may be effective in a court of law, it doesn't stop the process of organized, for-profit gossip from tarring that person for the rest of his or her life.

On balance, Max, putting public records on line is the right thing to do, but it isn't the obvious slam dunk of righteousness you make it out to be, either. When you pretend that it is, you cut off debate of the socially harmful effects of unlimited spread of almost all information. There are things which can be done to limit those harms, but not if we pretend they don't exist.

Journalists would be good people to make that case, since their profession depends on freedom of information.