I’ve gotten a few emails like this:

You appear to be getting ready to get your knickers in a twist over some umbrage by delay toward the internet. –I’m not an attorney, but my understanding is that a justice is supposed to deal with three inputs: 1) the facts of the case at hand; 2) the law, statutes, etc. that relate; and 3) precedent that relates.
To the extent that these are available in legitimate legal databases that are delivered online, so be it–but these are not and should not be considered as coming from research on “the internet” per se as we understand “the internet” to be a broad and deep source of information and communication that is not compiled, organized, screened and quality controlled as are specific databases, distributed commercially that come more or less with a guarantee of accuracy and veracity.
If Kennedy is “doing research” on that broader internet, perhaps we (and Mr. Delay) have found the source of some of the free-ranging, “living/evolving Constitution,” legislation from the bench that Kennedy and his cohorts of the bench have brought us. Thus, wandering around the net can, no doubt, bring one to access a broad world of International and European law, as well “evolving” cultural norms from around the world that seem to have come to take an important part in the Justice’s rulings/opinions. –If so, I think most at NRO would agree that this is not “a good thing,” but in fact a bad thing–and antithetical to the constructionist, “words on the page” approach that I think most at NRO–along with Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas–see as the appropriate and correct one.

Me: Poppycock! First, while we don’t know exactly what Delay meant, if he was ignorant of the fact that most legal research is done via online databases and the like, then he’s surprisingly ignorant.

Second, even if he was referring to non Lexis-Nexis type research, So what? Imagine if Delay said, “Justice Kennedy takes books from his private library himself! That’s outrageous.” That would be no less dumb than complaining that a justice “outrageously” uses the web for research himself. If Scalia Googles a Shakespeare quote rather than fishes it out of Bartlett’s it makes no never mind to me.

Third, I’ve written very harshly about the Justice’s invocation of foreign law and the like. But what that has to do with surfing the internet is beyond me. If Scalia surfed the internet to find out what Zimbabwe’s common law says about the death penalty, he’d probably do it to discover why Kennedy’s wrong. If Kennedy did it, he’d discover that the Zimbabweans are lightyears ahead of us in terms of jurisprudence. In other words, it’s the philosophical approach that’s bad — not the media a justice uses to obtain information to substantiate it.

The problem with Delay’s comment is that it sounds like luddism and crankery. I have no problem whatsoever with public officials criticizing judges who do bad things. That’s democracy. But Delay doesn’t help things by sounding like a caricature. Now, if Kennedy were getting his information from personal research of goat entrails, that’d be something different.