Tough to Search Dept: Court Records to Be Destroyed
September 21, 2011
The search of Federal court records may become even more difficult. Why? It’s tough to search something that doesn’t exist anymore. According to The Seattle Times’ article, “Millions of U.S. court records bound for shredder,” U.S. officials are destroying millions of court records to save money on storage. Supporters of the decision, including an analyst with the archives agency, claim that important documents will be kept digitally but it’s irrational to keep everything. Some of the files are simply mundane and insignificant. We learned:
Cornell Law School professor Theodore Eisenberg said it’s precisely the mundane, everyday records with no clear historical significance that are critical to establishing legal trends upon which court policy is often based. Something really important will be lost here,’ said Eisenberg…‘We would lose any ability to assess trends over time.’
The big question I have here – how are we to know which documents are going to be important in the future? As new people emerge in society, whether it be criminally or professionally, records that were once deemed insignificant wouldn’t be searchable to anyone. Is the cost the government will be saving in storage worth the price these documents could possibly have in the future?
Andrea Hayden, September 21, 2011
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