Use and abuse of Requests for Judicial Notice aka RJN, thru SEC.gov and beyond.

THE NEIL GARFIELD SHOW

Institutional litigants are misusing the court system throughout the dozens of state and Federal jurisdictions to get into evidence matters which are and should be barred from evidence or at least subject to dispute, and about which these same litigants often have no or little independent evidentiary support. One such major vehicle for advancing this practice is the use of Requests for Judicial Notice (RJN). Documents uploaded to SEC.gov, for example, are proferred as subject to judicial notice, even though the SEC website acts merely as a platform for publication, and not a proper registry, and neither monitors nor validates any documents placed on their site. In California, StorMedia,, Inc. v. Superior Court (1999) 20 Cal.4th 449, 457, fn. 9, has long controlled among other Cal cases RJNs in California litigation. This case holds that "When judicial notice is taken of a document...the truthfulness and proper interpretation of the document are disputable." Yet it is very common in California foreclosure litigation for courts to treat RJNs as if they do establish the truth of the matter asserted within the documents. This enables institutional defendants in Cal. borrower foreclosure litigation, to point as evidence to Plaintiff's presenting recorded documents only to dispute their content, as if the documents so presented and disputed are not subject to dispute, because of the taking of judicial notice.