The U.S. Supreme Court Twitter site looks official enough.
The home Web site it lists is the same as the Court's, and it seems to sent out tweets only when the justices hand down opinions. So is it an official Court site, yet another sign of the Court venturing into the modern era?
Bob Ambrogi spotted it and reported on it on his LawSites blog last month, and he was doubtful. The links to Court opinions that it tweets about out send you to a non-Court site, and it just doesn't look right. And as we noted here last week, a Twitter site that appeared to belong to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. turned out to be a fake. So is the Court Twitter account also an impostor?
In response to an inquiry, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg confirmed that the Twitter site is not connected to the Court in any way. So any thoughts you might have had of Justice David Souter fast-forwarding himself into the BlackBerry Age will have to wait.
But other federal courts are not waiting to open the door to Twitter -- which if you haven't yet partaken, is a networking site that allows you to send quick micro-blog posts of 140 character or less to people who know where to find them. More and more judges are allowing journalists to use Twitter to cover proceedings in their courtrooms.
Ron Sylvester, veteran courts reporter for the
Wichita Eagle, reports on
his blog that he'll be allowed to use Twitter to report on a forthcoming gang trial from inside U.S. District Court judge J. Thomas Marten's Wichita courtroom. Sylvester has covered numerous state court trials via Twitter -- and proven its value -- but this is his first time in federal court.
As his blog post indicates, though, the idea is beginning to catch on. (Legal Times has also used Twitter as one way to cover Senate confirmation hearings and the like, but with all electronic devices barred from the Supreme Court chamber, tweeting is not possible there.) Sylvester says readers tell him that the kind of running account that Twitter facilitates gives them more information about a trial than a typically brief account in the next day's newspaper would.
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