Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations

It has become increasingly common for a reader to follow a URL cited in a court opinion or a law review article, only to be met with an error message because the resource has been moved from its original online address. This form of reference rot, commonly referred to as ‘linkrot’, has arisen from t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Legal information management 2014-06, Vol.14 (2), p.88-99
Main Authors: Zittrain, Jonathan, Albert, Kendra, Lessig, Lawrence
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Annotations and citations (Law)
ARCHIVES
Citations
Court decisions and opinions
DESIGNS
Digital preservation
Editors
Errors
Feature Article
INTERNET
Law
Legal
Legal information
Libraries
Links
Messages
Online
Readers
Uniform Resource Locators
Web archiving
Web sites
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
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Summary:It has become increasingly common for a reader to follow a URL cited in a court opinion or a law review article, only to be met with an error message because the resource has been moved from its original online address. This form of reference rot, commonly referred to as ‘linkrot’, has arisen from the disconnect between the transience of online materials and the permanence of legal citation, and will only become more prevalent as scholarly materials move online. The present paper*, written by Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert and Lawrence Lessig, explores the pervasiveness of linkrot in academic and legal citations, finding that more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information. In light of these results, a solution is proposed for authors and editors of new scholarship that involves libraries undertaking the distributed, long-term preservation of link contents.
ISSN:1472-6696
1741-2021
DOI:10.1017/S1472669614000255