DENISE HOWELL has this interesting observation on the tendency for legal documents to show up on the Web:

When attorneys begin to realize that, thanks to the Internet, their dispute-related correspondence may have a broader audience than they thought – even for writings that, unlike legal pleadings, are not part of the public record – this could have a dramatic, and positive, effect on the tenor and content of those missives.

Over the long term, that’s probably true. And not the amount of attention Cardinal Law’s deposition — the sort of thing that wasn’t usually available to the public in complete form until very recently — has gotten. There’s both an up- and down-side to this.