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Kent County probate judge proposes statewide judicial notices website to replace newspaper publication
Summary
Judge Avery Rose urged the Michigan Judicial Council to consider a statewide, court‑managed notices portal that would generate, time‑stamp and archive court publication notices and could replace or supplement newspaper publication rules to reduce costs and improve due‑process notice.
Judge Avery Rose, a probate judge at Kent County Probate Court, told the Michigan Judicial Council that a single, public judicial notices portal could make court notice more reliable, searchable and less costly. He proposed two implementation paths: a “superseding” model that would make posting on a council‑managed site the legally sufficient publication method and a compromise model in which the portal supplements newspaper publication.
Rose said the portal would offer a guided form to generate required notice language, time‑stamp and lock content for an audit trail, provide automatic confirmation of publication to courts or filers, and allow public search by name, county or case type. “Effective notice is not cosmetic, it’s constitutional in nature,” Rose said, citing U.S. Supreme Court and Michigan precedent on due process and notice.
In the memo Rose described for council staff, Michigan currently requires notices to be archived at a statewide repository under an amended statutory provision he referenced as “Mcl. 6 9 1 10 51,” but the controlling proof of publication remains a newspaper publisher’s affidavit. Path 1, Rose said, would require targeted statutory and court‑rule amendments but yield the clearest due‑process gains and the largest cost relief for courts, which he said spend “tens of thousands of dollars, each year in publication fees.”
Under Path 2, the portal would be usable by courts and indigent parties and would provide online notice that either supplements or substitutes for newspaper publication; after posting, notices would still be forwarded to the existing publishers’ repository for later search. Rose acknowledged that changes to court rules — and possibly statute — would be necessary and left detailed legal determinations to the council.
Council members did not take action during the public comment period; Rose said he would provide a written memo outlining the proposal for staff review. The council will accept written comments and review the public submissions as it drafts its strategic agenda.
