Link Rot and the US Supreme Court

necro81 writes "Hyperlinks are not forever. Link rot occurs when a source you've linked to no longer exists — or worse, exists in a different state than when the link was originally made. Even permalinks aren't necessarily permanent if a domain goes silent or switches ownership. According to new research from Harvard Law, some 49% of hyperlinks in Supreme Court documents no longer point to the correct original content. A second study on link rot from Yale stresses that for the Court footnotes, citations, parenthetical asides, and historical context mean as much as the text of an opinion itself, which makes link rot a threat to future scholarship."

Comments

Wait a minute

[Dunbal]

Link rot could be "a threat to future scholarship"? WHO SAID TRAINING FEWER LAWYERS WAS A BAD THING? I just don't see the problem.

Re:Wait a minute

[The Grim Reefer]

* Lawyer: "Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?"

* Witness: "No."

* Lawyer: "Did you check for blood pressure?"

* Witness: "No."

* Lawyer: "Did you check for breathing?"

* Witness: "No."

* Lawyer: "So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?"

* Witness: "No."

* Lawyer: "How can you be so sure, Doctor?"

* Witness: "Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar."

* Lawyer: "But could the patient have still been alive nevertheless?"

* Witness: "Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere."

Good thing the NSA has it all backed up!

[the_scoots]

Good thing the NSA has it all backed up!

dupe story

[noh8rz10]

dupe

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/21/122210/implications-of-broken-links

Re:Library of Congress 2.0

[NatasRevol]

I think that duty was passed to another part of the government.