The Wired Supreme Court

Although the Roberts Supreme Court is viewed as potentially one of the most conservative in recent memory (as shown by its partial-birth decision a few weeks ago), an opinion this past week, Scott v. Harris, featured a startling innovation: the court put a video that was crucial to its decision on the court Website.

In the Scott case, a police high-speed chase of a speeding motorist ended when the police chase unit rammed the speeder's car, sending him off the highway and crippling him. He sued the officer and the police department under the federal civil rights statute (42 USC section 1983) for violating his fourth amendment right to be free from excessive force.

The officer moved for summary judgment. Summary judgment is a device for terminating a case (or part of it) before it goes to trial. Generally, when a party moves for summary judgment, if the court determines that there are no disputed facts that matter to the judgment, and under the law as applied to the undisputed facts the moving party is entitled to judgment, the court will grant that judgment. If there are any issues of material disputed facts, the court has to deny the motion without ruling on the merits. A federal civil rights statute case like this, where a public employee defendant moves for summary judgment, has a slightly different standard: Fact issues will not by themselves defeat the statute. Instead, the court resolves all factual disputes in the plaintiff's favor; and decides under those facts (1) whether the defendant violated the plaintiff's civil rights; (2) if so, whether the right was clearly established in the law and facts; and (3) if so, whether the defendant made a reasonable mistake as to the facts or law. A no answer to the first two questions, or a yes answer to the third, entitles the defendant to summary judgment.

That's where the video came into play. The officer gave a version of the chase in which the plaintiff's driving endangered those on the road. The plaintiff gave a version in which he drove safely. The lower courts ruled that on summary judgment this dispute had to be resolved in plaintiff's favor -- even though the video of the chase, according to the Supreme Court, supported the officer's version.

The majority of the Supreme Court ruled that where the record (here, the unimpeached video) flatly contradicted the nonmoving party's version of events, the court did not have to resolve the dispute in the nonmoving party's favor. The Supreme Court therefore accepted the video as true; and decided, based on the video, that the officer did not violate the plaintiff's constitutional rights.

That was the innovation in the law. The innovation in technology was the Court's footnote inviting readers of the opinion to judge the video for themselves; and then putting the video on the Web. For a court that still refuses to let its arguments be televised, it was a surprising move -- and yet another sign of the coming of the Youtube age.