"Free room service, free cable -- ooh, Free Willy!"

I recently came across this article in the New York Times, describing how jurors are using Blackberries, Cell Phones, and other portable internet browsers to research cases they are sitting for. At the risk of sounding cynical, I'm not sure that this is such a horrifying development. Many civil litigation cases, and certainly most of the large ones, are highly complex. Without background knowledge and research, a juror will find it extremely difficult to evaluate the arguments each side is making. This means that jury verdicts in these complex civil cases will contain a large element of randomness. It's no accident that a larger and larger percentage of these cases are being settled out of court each year -- when the stakes are high, most parties become risk-averse, and relying on a jury verdict is an inherently risky proposition. Jurors who surreptitiously conduct online research certainly breach the legal principle of impartiality (at least in a practical sense, since it is impossible to know the biases of their sources), and I'm not ready to set aside that principle just yet. But the system we have now is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and it's time to confront that fact. Perhaps this story will help bring the issue to the fore.