{"id":76410,"date":"2009-12-11T12:55:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-11T17:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20091210\/2117597304.shtml"},"modified":"2009-12-11T12:55:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-11T17:55:00","slug":"florida-says-judges-cant-even-be-facebook-friends-with-lawyers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/76410","title":{"rendered":"Florida Says Judges Can’t Even Be Facebook Friends With Lawyers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, we wrote about a lawsuit in North Carolina, where the judge friended<\/a> one of the lawyers, and read and exchanged messages about the case with the lawyer on Facebook. That, obviously, seemed a bit extreme — but what about just the plain old act of “friending” between a judge and a lawyer. Down in Florida, they’ve decided that’s simply not allowed at all<\/a>:<\/p>\n


\n Whether a judge may add lawyers who may appear before the judge as “friends” on a social networking site, and permit such lawyers to add the judge as their “friend.”<\/p>\n

ANSWER: No.
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That doesn’t leave much room for ambiguity, does it? But, as Venkat Balasubramani notes, this is somewhat ridiculous<\/a>. Judges and lawyers often have social relationships beyond the court, and pretending those don’t exist just on Facebook seems pretty artificial.<\/p>\n


\nMy question to the advisory committee is whether this means that it’s now inappropriate for a judge to have lunch with a lawyer friend, or engage in email banter with lawyer friends? Is attending the same party now off limits? I assume these actions would still be viewed as appropriate, given that lawyers and judges interact socially (and publicly) all the time. What’s so special about Facebook friendship?
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Permalink<\/a> | Comments<\/a> | Email This Story<\/a>
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, we wrote about a lawsuit in North Carolina, where the judge friended one of the lawyers, and read and exchanged messages about the case with the lawyer on Facebook. That, obviously, seemed a bit extreme — but what about just the plain old act of “friending” between a judge and a lawyer. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}