Online Courts and the Future of Justice

Our court system is struggling. It is too costly to deliver justice for all but the few, too slow to satisfy those who can access it. Yet the values implicit in disputes being resolved in person, and in public, are fundamental to how we have imagined the fair resolution of disputes for centuries. Could justice be delivered online? The idea has excited and appalled in equal measure, promising to bring justice to all, threatening to strike at the heart of what we mean by justice.

With online courts now moving from idea to reality, we are looking at the most fundamental change to our justice system for centuries, but the public understanding of and debate about the revolution is only just beginning.
In Online Courts and the Future of Justice Richard Susskind, a pioneer of rethinking law for the digital age, confronts the challenges facing our legal system and the potential for technology to bring much needed change. Drawing on years of experience leading the discussion on conceiving and delivering online justice, Susskind here charts and develops the public debate.

Against a background of austerity politics and cuts to legal aid, the public case for online courts has too often been framed as a business case by both sides of the debate. Are online courts preserving the public bottom line by finding efficiencies? Or sacrificing the interests of the many to deliver cut price justice? Susskind broadens the debate by making the moral case (whether online courts are required by principles of justice) and the jurisprudential case (whether online courts are compatible with our understanding of judicial process and constitutional rights) for delivering justice online.

Introduction

PART ONE - IS COURT A SERVICE OR A PLACE?

1. Why courts matter
2. The case for change
3. Advances in technology
4. Outcome-thinking
5. Physical, virtual, online
6. Access to justice and law
7. Justice according to the law
8. Tackling injustice

PART TWO - ARCHITECTURE

9. The vision
10. Framework
11. Online guidance
12. Assisted argument
13. Dissolving not resolving
14. Online judging
15. Beyond civil
16. Law and Code
17. Case studies

PART THREE - THE CASE AGAINST

18. On objecting
19. Economy-class courts
20. Transparency
21. A fair trial
22. Digital exclusion
23. Encouraging litigiousness
24. A jurisprudential miscellany
25. Public sector technology

PART FOUR - THE FUTURE

26. The global challenge
27. Telepresence, augmented and virtual reality
28. Advanced online dispute resolution
29. Artificial intelligence
30. The computer judge

Conclusion
Appendix - critical success factors
Further Reading