Law in the Internet Society

Paper Title

-- By JoseMariaDelajara - 05 Oct 2019

The problem

Support for open government is growing. However, the progress in opening judicial data sets has been slower than that of the legislative and executive branches. The main fear of judicial officers seems to be the perception that new technologies (i.e. data analytics) could have adverse effects on the employee’s job. In other words, judges seem to be worried that data analytics will show their decisions as they really are: irrational yet predictable. When we face the complete picture of our flawed justice system, will we still accept it?

Open justice

Open data in the judiciary resides on three principles: (1) transparency, (2) seeking citizen participation (3) institutional collaboration. According to Elena, an open justice system should at least publish (1) court rulings, (2) statistics regarding the performance of courts and (3) budget allocation information. Also, that data should be both legally and technically open. Citizens need to be allowed to freely access, reuse and distribute the data, which should be made available in a machine-readable format and in bulk.

Effects

Limits

Will we like our reflection in the mirror?

The English excuses

The French #JudicialBan

Recently, France banned the publication of statistical information about judges’ decisions. Anyone who breaks the law could be punished with a sentence of up to five years in prison. On its article 33, the new French Justice Reform Act states that “_the identity data of the magistrates and the members of the judiciary may not be reused with the purpose or effect of evaluating, analyzing, comparing or predicting their actual or presumed professional practices_”. Hence, the French Government did not intend to stop publishing the data; just to punish its comprehension through data analytics.

The way forward

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r3 - 07 Oct 2019 - 05:21:00 - JoseMariaDelajara
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