Getting papers “served” to you is a common enough thing in the United States. It heralds a lawsuit, or divorce, or other court procedure. But one of the most difficult parts of serving someone papers can be finding that person. Sometimes the person knows they’re about to get served and takes pains to avoid the ordeal, or sometimes they have just become unreachable. In cases like that, the plaintiff has to wait it out and try their best to find the person they’re going after.
That may all be changing soon, though. A judge in New York made a ground-breaking ruling last week that papers can be served via Facebook.
The case involved a Staten Island man named Neal Biscocho who was attempting to find his ex-wife and serve her with a legal noticing stating that he doesn’t plan to pay his court-ordered child support anymore, given that their son had turned 21. His ex-wife, Anna Maria Antigua, was very difficult to get in touch with. He tried pretty much everything available to him, and eventually went to court to try to sort it out. He brought his case to Staten Island Support Magistrate Gregory Gliedman, who noticed that Biscocho had put in his affidavit that Antigua had a consistent social media presence on Facebook.
Based on that, Gliedman ruled that Antigua could be served via Facebook. A local family law lawyer, Michael Stutman, supported Gliedman’s ruling, stating, “the idea that physically handing someone a piece of paper is the only way to serve notice is archaic.”
It make sense. After all, there are plenty of things that we do online now — banking, schoolwork, dating, and the like — that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Also, allowing similar legal processes through social media has been explored in Europe; this ruling was just notable because it was the first one in the United States.
Serving legal papers via Facebook was deemed acceptable in Ireland two years ago. Earlier this month, an Irish judge ruled that papers could be served over LinkedIn. The lawyers in the case explained that they made it clear that the the only convenient and efficient way in which the plaintiff could be reached would have been through the social media site, stating:
We put the circumstances on affidavit and asked for an order allowing us to serve papers through a LinkedIn page by sending them a message with the details of the case and a link to the URL where the papers are served.
Another important part of the case involved the fact that on LinkedIn, you can see whether direct messages have been read. This allowed the server to see that the recipient had indeed received the papers. Facebook messages have the same feature, which may be one of the reasons that Facebook is able to be used to serve papers moving forward.
It’s certainly an interesting evolution in the way in which our legal system interacts with technology. I applaud Gliedman for his certainly progressive decision, although whether it not it holds up as precedent remains to be seen.
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Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.
Featured image courtesy of [Maria Elena via Flickr]