Facts are crucial—indeed, typically decisive—in litigation. In our civil justice system, determining the facts depends on the litigants, who discover, present and rebut evidence to prove their version of the relevant facts, all in an adversarial system designed to reveal the truth.
With growing frequency, however, courts in this information age—including appellate courts—are “finding” facts by “Googling,” or researching on the Internet and then taking “judicial notice” of facts found online. And courts are finding a variety of facts this way, from facts about Lyme disease, as in Gent v. CUNA Mutual Insurance Society, 611 F.3d 79, 84 n.5 (1st Cir. 2010); the number of games that a National Football League lineman played in California, as in Matthews v. NFL Management Council, 688 F.3d 1107, 1113 (9th Cir. 2012); and even that “there are lots of different yellow rain hats,” as in United States v. Bari, 599 F.3d 176, 178-81 (2d Cir. 2010).
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