Horse-and-buggy dockets in the Internet age, and the travails of a courthouse reporter.

• Author: Denniston, Lyle

If one dates the Internet Age from 1989, with English computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web, it is perhaps fair to suggest that news reporting from America's courthouses should have been digitally possible for most of two decades. With rare--too rare--exceptions, (1) however, the news-gatherer on the courthouse beat is still functionally inhibited by the backwardness of most courts in the design, operation, and maintenance of their electronic dockets.

Can one be serious in making that complaint? My gosh--poor legal reporting is a problem of docket management? Indeed.

How the digital docket is managed is a matter of utmost seriousness in "Covering the Appellate Courts." This is not merely a functional failing within the middle and higher-level courts themselves: It is a direct threat to the accuracy and reliability of news accounts about the workings of the nation's appellate judiciary--federal, state, and local.

The underlying premise of this criticism is simple to state: No courthouse reporter can do his or her work without prompt--sometimes, virtually immediate--access to original documents. And this is especially true at the appellate level. News reporters and editors are fond of saying that a reporter is only as good as his or her sources. For the courthouse reporter--indeed, for any reporter who would undertake to cover the law, possibly at any level--there is no source equal to, and certainly none superior to, an actual document.

Perhaps there lingers a romantic notion (probably dating from the era when a sweating reporter, snap-brim hat askew, phone jammed in an ear, would call the office, and demand imperiously: "Get me rewrite, Sweetheart!") that a reporter can be quite successful merely by using the telephone and shoe leather. Why can't a legal reporter (any less than a reporter on the political beat) call up a court clerk, perhaps even a judge, and ask that most common of questions in the verbal commerce among the Boys on the Bus: "Hey, what's happening? What do you hear?" A talented interview technique is part of all news reporting, sure; but for the reporter following the work of an appeals court, it is no substitute for having actual legal documents--in hand, or, in this Internet Age, displayed on a PC screen.

Let's unpack these opening observations. And, to begin to do so, let's start where courthouse news often begins (and where, too often, it actually ends)--the trial.

The vast number of newspaper inches and broadcast minutes devoted to legal news are reports about trials--mainly, criminal trials. News editors and news producers in all popular media have a perhaps-natural fascination with the drama, usually the human drama, of a trial. Is it possible to imagine a more compelling image in the law, to be broadcast and to be written about, than O.J. Simpson trying on an ill-fitting glove that had been found at the murder scene? That is not just great television imagery; it is the heart of most legal news in America's popular media. Trial scenes allow journalists to capture the meaning of the criminal trial process, or at least the most vivid forms of trial tactics, in a capsule. Whether on the TV or PC screen, on a tiny PDA visual, or in the descriptive prose of a talented newspaper or magazine writer, such imagery tells the story. (Indeed, every reporter whose regular legal beat is the appellate courts should, every now and then, find a trial to cover, or at least to watch, just to know what that encapsulating experience in journalism can be--for its entertainment value, if nothing else.)

In a journalistic era when personality news tends to predominate over substantive issue news, the characters that people a trial courtroom quite naturally are the main focus for reporters (and editors). An explanation of trial strategy, if it can be made vivid, will sometimes get into the story, but trial news is fundamentally people news. But this is not routinely the case if the trial is one about civil law. Editors, and reporters, generally do not feel the same professional affection for a civil trial. This is not to say that a newsworthy civil trial will go begging for coverage; the various first-tier proceedings--the trials--in the Bush v. Gore saga were saturated with coverage. So would be an important civil case about, say, abortion or gay rights or National Security Agency wiretapping. Or a civil trial where Really Big Money is at stake--like United States v. Microsoft. (2)

But, by and large, civil trials are not about people as much as they are about issues. And, as with criminal trials, it is the outcome--the verdict--toward which the journalistic fascination ultimately points. Whereas a criminal trial may well get day-by-day coverage, it is the rare civil trial that will. How often does a courthouse executive have to divide up seats among a throng of journalists for a high-stakes civil trial, compared with a high-visibility criminal trial? The answer is obvious: It happens, but seldom.

Move the setting, then, up to the appellate level. It is a scene mainly of blue serge and black robes, of talking heads and almost no props. No bloody knife in a plastic bag resting on a polished table. No ghastly photos of crime scenes, with body forms in grotesque poses outlined in chalk. No scratchy audiotapes of overheard criminal plots. No soaring, pleading, even shouting orations to the jury (the jury box, if there is one, is quite possibly filled with law clerks, attempting to look inconspicuous). Benign...