MinnLawyer blog

YouTube — all the kids are using it these days, sharing their video clips and what not — and now so is the usually staid Minnesota Court of Appeals.

Goetz v. Independent School District No. 625, an unpublished Court of Appeals decision released today, involves a lawsuit brought by a 14-year-old girl against her school for injuries sustained while performing a difficult gymnastics maneuver known as Tsukahara vault during a school-sanctioned program. (The court ultimately concluded the recreational-use doctrine barred the claim.)

For lay folk such as myself who might not know what the heck a Tsukahara vault is, the court included the following footnote:

The school district cited a video of Mitsuo Tsukahara performing his namesake vault at the 1976 Olympics.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TmYqSOYZr0(last visited Dec. 16, 2008). Goetz did not object to the citation. We found the video to be helpful.

I found the video helpful too. Ouch. Don’t try that at home. It rather reminds me of Rodney Dangerfield doing the triple lindy dive in the movie “Back to School.”

Kudos to the Court of Appeals for its willingness to venture into new technologies to get the best understanding possible of the case it was called on to decide. Now had the court made the YouTube link on the electronic version of the case on its website interactive, I would have been doubly impressed. … Oh, well. A journey of a thousand miles on the information superhighway starts with a single mouse click.