information panopticon

The Times has a story today about jurors who are increasingly using the web to do a bit of extracurricular research on the cases they’re hearing, facebooking and twittering the proceedings even as they are going on, and even using their knowledge of how they are about to decide civil suits to engage in a bit of insider trading. For anyone wedded to the ancient “rules of evidence, developed over hundreds of years of jurisprudence” — that is to say, almost all of us – this is a problem.