Nevada Appellate Lawyer & Attorney : Tami D. Cowden : Nevada Supreme Court, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

Appealing in Nevada will henceforth devote Wednesdays to reporting on the world of women and the law – especially women lawyers, here in Nevada and elsewhere.

This is a subject near and dear to me, since, in case you hadn’t noticed, I happen to be both a woman and a lawyer.

Women who happen to be lawyers face challenges unlike those faced by men, resulting in a need to make choices that men simply don’t need to make. For example, I daresay very few men attend law school while pregnant, as I did.  Although the pregnancy did not have a negative effect my class rank (in fact, I advanced in rank), the birth of my daughter in June, between my second and third years of law school, did preclude my acceptance of a summer clerkship similar to those taken by my peers.  My subsequent employment choices: i.e., government and academia also reflected certain realities wrought by my status as a parent (including seven years as a single parent). 

I do not regret the choices I made. I have a wonderful daughter, now an adult, with whom I have a good relationship.  My employment choices enabled me to volunteer in her classroom, be an assistant Brownie leader for her troop, coach her sports teams, and for most days during middle and high school, be home when she came home from school. I was, and am, a terrific mom, as she tells me every now and again.

When she went to college, I went to work in a law firm. My employment choices also shaped the lawyer I am today, including what a lawyer with what I immodestly consider to be exemplary writing skills.

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What can I say – wikis fascinate me, as my previous post about Wikipedia might suggest.  So I was quite excited to hear about Top 7 Alternatives to Wikipedia posted by Jimmy Atkinson at OEDb. Three of the seven alternatives are other wikis, including Scholarpedia, which limits contributors to approved scholars; Citizendium, created by one of the founders of Wikipedia, but with content approved by editors; Conservapedia, a conservative, Christian-based wiki that doesn’t allow any of that nasty sex or other left wing type stuff; and—oh, joy!—even  Uncyclopedia, a “content-free” encyclopedia (sort of an Onion version of Wikipedia).

That made me wonder what other wikis are out there.   Previously, I listed a variety of law related wikis, but I knew there must be some really fun wikis.  Here are a few that caught my pop-culture addicted eye:   

Romance Wiki (produced by my friend, Kassia, at Booksquare.com);

TV wiki;

Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki;

Wookieepedia, a Star Wars wiki;

and my new favorite, Wikiquote. Since I like to sprinkle a quote into my briefs where appropriate, I think I’ll find this cite useful, as well as fun.

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Robert Ambrogi has an article in Law.com's Legal Technology News about the proliferation of legal wikis, "Legal Wikis Are Bound to Wow You."  For the as yet uninitiated, a wiki is a type of website that allows users to contributed, delete, or revise existing content.  The best known example is likely the collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Ambrogi lists a number of legal wikis.  I found the following particularly intriguing:

"Death Penalty Wiki. Started by California lawyer Mike Cernovich, co-author of the blog Crime & Federalism, this attempts to maintain a collaboratively edited log of death penalty cases. "

"JurisPedia. This encyclopedia of world law is a project of law schools in France, Vietnam, Netherlands, Germany and Canada. It contains more than 300 articles available in seven languages."

"Wikiocracy. What happens when you put the law in the hands of the people? That is the question underlying this site, where citizens can rewrite actual laws or create their own. "

"Wiki Law School. Think of this as CliffsNotes for the collaboration generation. The purpose is to provide outlines of all law school topics. "

See the Ambrogi's complete list in "Legal Wikis Are Bound to Wow You." 

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Texas Appellate Law Blog recently questioned whether the 5^th Circuit should have cited to Wikipedia for the definition of the word “accrue” (although the term defined in the wiki is actually “accrual”). With Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Commissioner, the 5^th Circuit joins a number of other federal circuits who have similarly cited to the collaborative encyclopedia as an authority.

The Volokh Conspiracy first reported a federal court citation to Wikipedia way back in 2004, noting the potential risk to citing to an authority that is “so easily compromised.” Fast forward a few years, and in January 2007, the New York Times reported that more than one hundred judicial opinions, including 13 from circuit courts of appeal, contained references to the wiki resource. The Times article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of such usage, with the various legal authorities cited therein generally coming down in favor of citation if limited to tangential, background matters.

I began writing this post with the idea that protests against citing wikis were but another example of Luddite-like obstinacy against progress. Why shouldn’t collective intelligence be considered reliable, especially when used for matters such as popular definitions? As James Surowiecki told us in The Wisdom of Crowds,  “Ask the Audience” was the most reliable lifeline in Who Wants to be A Millionaire?

But then I stumbled upon Wikipedia’s own article on the topic, Wikipedia as a court source. In contrast to the New York Time’s count of more than one hundred references (confirmed by a quick review of the results of a Westlaw search), Wikipedia reports itself appearing in fewer than forty citations – and more than a few of those were not even court opinions, but instead, references in briefs and foreign legal documents.   The most recent example, Exxon Mobil Corp. does not appear. 

Therein lies a substantial risk of citing collaborative resources.  None of the collectively intelligent have yet taken sufficient interest in this topic to insure the litany is complete.

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