If you get the majority of your primary legal information from the free online sources, much of which is provided by governmental entities, then you are among the majority of lawyers today. See 2009 American Bar Association Legal Technology Survey. However, The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), State-by-State Reports on Authentication of Online Legal Resources ("Authentication Report") (2007) demonstrates that we need to use great caution in relying on such information.
As David G. Badertscher and Deborah E. Melnick reported in the 2010 ABA Journal, "Is primary legal information on the web trustworthy?", the Authentication Report "presents the findings of a survey that targeted six sources of law: state administrative codes and registers, state statutes and session laws, and state high and intermediate appellate court opinions." The upshot of the Authentication Report is that while these sources are "official" because mandated or approved by statute or code, they have not generally been verified by the relevant governmental entity as being "complete and unaltered when compared to he version approved or published by the content originator." Badertscher and Melnick conclude that "[s]tate online primary legal resources and, therefore, not sufficiently trustworthy."
Personally, I had never perceived public sources to be particularly trustworthy. I thought I was just conservative and/or too imbued with the "brand identification" of Lexis or Westlaw, but it turns out I am actually a visionary in my skepticism. That's nice.
But, facetiousness aside, the world is going digital and it is incumbent on a civil society based on the rule of law to maintain and authenticate online legal resources going forward into the future. Indeed, to save costs many governmental agencies are doing away with print version of their laws entirely. In this regard in particular, Badertscher and Melnick make a timely and valid point, and they also have some really well thought out and rather technical ideas for what states can do to that end. I recommend anyone involved in law-making or the practice of law to skim their article, and I recommend it to "techies" without any such limitation.
Badertscher and Melnick also raise, but do not elaborate on, the exponential growth of law over the past 200 years. As Justice Joseph Story stated before the Suffolk Massachusetts Bar in 1821, "[t]he mass of the law is, to be sure, accumulating with an almost incredible rapidity ...It is impossible not to look without some discouragement upon the ponderous volumes, which the next half century will add to the groaning shelves of our jurists." This observation continues to be timely except that more sources will be moved to the infinite storage space of ether over time. Keeping in mind the nature of The Law to steadily expand to address and fill all new or suggested issues and available surfaces and corners, it is imperative for law-making/compiling entities to engage today in the front-loaded task of establishing sound means and processes for authenticating and verifying the digitized "volumes" as well.
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