Wimberly v. Stern
- Vernon Broderick
- 1:22-cv-07581
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 1
In Wimberly v. Stern, Judge Broderick granted Wimberly’s request to notice publicly available webpages without deciding whether their contents were true.
Jason Wimberly and the defendants in the case; the order concerns the identified webpages and does not determine the truth of their contents.
What happened
In Wimberly v. Stern, Jason Wimberly asked the Southern District of New York to take judicial notice of Spring Bank’s website and identified webpages. The motion relied on a federal evidence rule concerning facts that are not reasonably disputed.
The court granted the application. It recognized the identified webpages as publicly available and said their existence was not reasonably disputable.
Judge Vernon S. Broderick emphasized that the order did not decide whether the statements on any of the webpages were true.
The detailed version
- Wimberly v. Stern · No. 1:22-cv-07581
- Vernon Broderick
- July 21, 2023
Background
Plaintiff Jason Wimberly filed a motion asking the court to take judicial notice of Defendant Spring Bank’s website in its entirety or, alternatively, of specified webpages. The motion cited Federal Rule of Evidence 201 and listed pages from Spring Bank’s website, an American Banker webpage concerning Melanie Stern, and the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund website.
Ruling
The court granted the application. It took judicial notice of the identified website pages because they were publicly available and their existence was not subject to reasonable dispute. Judicial notice permits a court to accept certain facts without requiring ordinary proof. The court expressly stated that it made no findings about the truth of matters asserted on the webpages.
Effect
The order addressed only whether the webpages’ existence and public availability could be judicially noticed. It did not determine whether the information published on those pages was accurate or resolve the underlying claims in Wimberly v. Stern.
Read the full 1-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.