It is a truism that law often lags technology. Near the end of the U.S. Supreme Court’s past term, the court issued a decision in which the majority opinion, by Justice Anthony Kennedy, recognized the importance of social media in most people’s lives. The ramifications of the court’s statements about social media, in Packingham v. North Carolina, __ U.S. __, 137 S. Ct. 1730, 198 L. Ed. 2d 273 (June 19, 2017), already are reverberating in New York courts.
‘Packingham’
In 2008, North Carolina enacted a statute making it a felony for a registered sex offender “to access a commercial social networking Web site where the sex offender knows that the site permits minor children to become members or to create or maintain personal Web pages.” The law as enacted covered commonplace social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
