Divorce by Facebook
Here’s a real DIS-like on Facebook (FB).
A judge in Manhattan is granting a woman permission to serve her husband divorce papers through a Facebook message.
New York State Supreme Court justice Matthew Cooper is agreeing to the move because the plaintiff, Ellanora Arthur Baidoo, is unable to reach husband Victor Sena Blood-Dzraku via typical legal methods. Cooper saying:
"Under the circumstance presented here, service by Facebook, albeit novel and nontraditional, is the form of service that most comports with the constitutional standards of due process. Not only is it reasonably calculated to provide defendant with notice that he is being sued for divorce, but every indication is that it will achieve what should be the goal of every method of service: actually delivering the summons to him."
Yahoo Finance’s Aaron Task believes the idea that a judge would actually allow this points out how important social media has become.
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“It goes to show Facebook is the public square now,” he says. “The New York Daily News reports they hired a private detective to try to find this guy, and the only place they could find him was on Facebook. That’s pretty powerful.”
The judge recognized that in his ruling as well.
"In this age of technological enlightenment, what is for the moment unorthodox and unusual stands a good chance of sooner or later being accepted and standard, or even outdated and passé. And because legislatures have often been slow to react to these changes, it has fallen on courts to insure that our legal procedures keep pace with current technology.”
Yahoo Finance Editor in Chief Andy Serwer thinks the use of Facebook in the legal realm could actually be very good for the company’s business.
“They want to be in every part of our lives,” he points out. “They are constantly wrestling with those kinds of issues. Maybe someone over there today is saying 'you’ve been able to hook up and connect on Facebook so easily, so readily, why not be able to have a conscious decoupling?'”
Task jokes that kind of deep thinking fits the stereotype of the culture in Silicon Valley.
“It’s good for the philosophy majors,” he laughs. “Isn’t that what most these people were who have these jobs-- philosophy majors?”
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