Supreme Court Enters the YouTube Era

The Supreme Court is entering the YouTube era. The first citation in a petition filed with the court last month, for instance, was not to an affidavit or a legal precedent but rather to a YouTube video link. The video shows what is either appalling police brutality or a measured response to an arrested man's intransigence — you be the judge. Such evidence vérité has the potential to unsettle the way appellate judges do their work, according to a new study in The Harvard Law Review. If Supreme Court justices can see for themselves what happened in a case, the study suggests, they may be less inclined to defer to the factual findings of jurors and to the conclusions of lower-court judges.