Oregon Legal Research Blog
Excerpt: “Rotten World of Legal Citation,” July 31st, 2014 by sadavis:
In the past few years, the issue of link rot has become a growing concern in relation to broken links in legal citations, most notably in U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Two articles that discuss this problem in detail are:
1) Raizel Liebler & June Liebert, Something Rotten in the State of Legal Citation: The Life of a United States Supreme Court Citation Containing an Internet Link (1996-2010), 15 Yale J.L. & Tech. 273 (2013). Available at http://yjolt.org/sites/default/files/Something_Rotten_in_Legal_Citation.pdf (finding that 29% of websites cited in US Supreme Court opinions no longer worked);
2) Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert & Lawrence Lessig, Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations, 127 Harv. L. Rev. F. 176 (2014). Available at http://harvardlawreview.org/2014/03/perma-scoping-and-addressing-the-problem-of-link-and-reference-rot-in-legal-citations/ (finding that 49.9% of websites cited in US Supreme Court opinions and 29.9-34.2% cited in three law reviews no longer linked to the originally cited material – at 180, 186).... [Link to full Rotten World blog post.]