Legal Research

Can Wikipedia Be A Source of Evidence?

By John Gregory

Badasa v. U.S.: Here’s a US immigration case in which the US government offered information from Wikipedia to support its argument about the status of Ethiopian travel documents. The appeals court eventually found that this was not a good source of evidence, and sent the matter back for reconsideration.

ArsTechnica has the story.

Does this sound right to you? Would a print encyclopedia be any better?

I don’t see in this story any concern about the hearsay nature of the evidence — like that of any website, pretty well, surely — though that might depend on the use being made of it (i.e. the usual rules about what hearsay is and when it might be used anyway would apply.)

Will the reasoning in this case change the way you do research to support your legal opinions and arguments?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 11, 2008 (boomark / email).