How accurate is Internet law?

Amid the hell and fury whirling around us today, we hear and read the phrase "the rule of law" being used so often and we begin to wonder whether those who say it know what they are really talking about. That brilliant jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once said: "The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience." Another statement of his is also relevant and striking: "Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion."

These are statements covered with the wisdom of one of the world’s most renowned jurists. It is possible that the people who mouth the words "the rule of law" have not heard of or read the words of the late Justice Holmes. For a lot of lawyers, and non-lawyers, the phrase merely refers to the rigidity of a legal or a constitutional provision. But warm, living public opinion has to stand closely behind the law.

A fundamental principle for instance, like "Sovereignty resides in the people and all government authority emanates from them" is a constitutional provision that is alive. It is living law. For law grows, legal wealth expands, jurisprudential law even changes with time.

This, however, is not my subject for today. This article has to do with the Internet as a litigation tool today. So many potential legal clients try not to consult their lawyers first because lawyers’ fees can be stupefying. Instead, they use the Internet to find the law for the case in point. But the Internet law they find may not necessarily be accurate.

It is good to consult the machine before approaching the lawyer, but it should be undertaken comprehensively, to the best extent possible. For all you know, you may end up knowing more about the most current jurisprudence on the matter after your Internet adventure assuming you’re super good at Internet research and are the master of your computer. In which case, your lawyer, as you confer with him, may feel duty bound to reduce his fees because you know so much.

Very definitely, the Internet is a litigation tool. It certainly can be used as an evidence-gathering mechanism. Evidence gathering often involves a search for data in word processing files, databases and spreadsheets. This sort of e-data is, of course, in the possession of the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and those who operate the Internet’s backbone.

Those who litigate on behalf of both the public and private sector target the Internet, and the regulatory agencies of the global telecommunity are among the most active requesters of e-data, where e-data have played crucial roles in both civil and criminal investigations.

I remember at a plenipotentiary conference of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) held in Japan more than a decade ago, during his first incumbency as ambassador to Japan, I met my friend, Ambassador Domingo "June" Siazon, who, after serving as the Philippine secretary of foreign affairs, was appointed by the present dispensation, to a second term as ambassador to Japan where he still is. He speaks excellent Japanese, Madame Siazon being Japanese who, of course, has lived here in our country and looks more Filipina than Japanese. June, on the other hand, looks more Japanese than Filipino, a good-looking one, for that’s what I told him when I first met him in Japan.

It was June Siazon who was designated alternate head of the Philippine delegation which I headed and that’s where we met Yoshio Utsumi, the chairman of the conference, Japan being the host country. Utsumi is now on his second term as secretary general of the ITU. June and I had an interesting interaction with chairman Utsumi in Japan that had to do with Japanese chauvinism clashing with Filipino gallantry which Ambassador Siazon displayed on my behalf, but that’s another story.

Even during that time, more than 10 years ago, Japan, being extremely technologically progressive, was already doing extensive and rigorous research on that astounding machine – the computer.

These thoughts come back to me as I write this. Utsumi has become such a good friend of mine. A couple of months ago, from Geneva, via overseas telephone, we talked about the next Geneva Telecom Conference and Expo which is going to be held next year in Hong Kong. He told me that Hong Kong is just a little over an hour away by plane from Manila and asked me to be one of the speakers. I have always enjoyed and learned so much from these ITU-sponsored conferences and expositions where you cannot help but marvel over the newest technologies.

I told him I do not know where our country will be in January and told him that right now I have been clamoring for a new soul for my beloved country.

The Internet was still non-existent that time in Japan when I first met June Siazon and Yoshio Utsumi, although rigid developmental researches were already being undertaken, and the Internet’s birth became such a fast-growing phenomenon, indeed very hard to keep up with.

The Internet, however, is not yet a regulated source of legal information – so much of what one finds there may not be accurate – but you may still get good legal information about Internet law from the Internet if you conduct your research in the proper manner.

Should you use the Internet to research Internet law or any other law for that matter, bear in mind that it is advisable to check your results. The easiest way to do that, by the way, is to get a second opinion from the Internet. Research the same question on several Internet sites and keep surfing and searching until most of the information you have accumulated becomes consistent. If consistency is not achieved, the best thing you can do is to check out the dates. Usually, the later sources are more accurate and this becomes particularly true when the later source cites the earlier one.

The next thing to consider is the credibility of the source and to be able to do this, one must identify the author of the Internet site. Many of these legal sites have contact addresses on them and you can use it to look at the credentials of the person or organization that has written the article or who runs the site.

Lastly, one important thing to do is to invest some time in understanding the law in general. There are so many Internet law sites on the Internet. A lot of people use www.lawguru.com to find Internet law statutes, and let me tell you, this site has links to the statutes of every state and territory.

Although statutes are the basis of Internet law, they could be too scholarly and erudite to be of practical value. It may be of great help to start one’s research at www.sidebar.com, which has a number of links to legal websites and resources that provide links to law schools, libraries and government and legislative sites. One of the top officials of the Motorola head office in Washington DC at one time, who remains a friend today, e-mailed me recently to let me know that www.law.cornell.edu may be the site most used by lawyers in the US. He is a lawyer that went to the Yale Law School four years ahead of me – something I always reminded him of, by the way – and I asked him why people don’t use the Yale Law School site, Yale, having been rated consistently for decades now, as the best law school in the world. Perhaps, he said, the Yale approach is too erudite for many of the legal practitioners. We both had a good laugh on this.

In fact, one of the e-mails I got recently asked me which site was best. Joselito Contreras, who is taking the bar in September, needed some advice after reading an earlier article of mine on Internet Law. That’s the reason I decided to write this article. He explained in his e-mail that he supported himself through law school and now, as he prepares for the bar, is a legal researcher in a law office.

This young man is among the many young minds just starting out in life. They are happy that they’ve obtained their degrees and are now beginning to forge lives of their own. The disappointments and heartaches of the young – the leaders of tomorrow – should be a very relevant matter on the agenda of selfish politicians.

How can they endeavor and work so hard and manage to steer their lives to such a trajectory toward the highest values, if corruption gyrates with demons at the helm, as the truth has become meaningless and trampled upon. I told him over the phone: "Joselito, what we truly need to create for you, the generation after us, is a new soul for our country."

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Thank you for your e-mails sent to jtl@pldtdsl.net.