Will Twitter Be Following You in the Courtroom: Why Reporters Should Be Allowed to Broadcast during Courtroom Proceedings

Thanks to micro-blogging and social networking tools, we no longer have to pick up a phone to call our friends and ask them what they are doing. Instead we turn to our laptop, BlackBerry, or iPhone to get instant information available to us through the Internet. Twitter is a key player in the Internet information exchange line-up and has made its way into one of the oldest and most archaic forums: the courtroom. The current law does not properly address whether reporters should be allowed to tweet, but this trend is becoming more prevalent. Twitter needs to be addressed with our current society in mind; a society wanting instant access to information. This note will discuss the history of prohibitions against broadcasting in the court, analyze the reasons why reporters should be allowed to use Twitter and other micro-blogging tools in the courtroom, and propose a solution for how their presence can be accounted for in order to maintain order in the court