Panel: E-access to Justice
Jane Bailey, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
Jacquie Burkell – Associate Professor, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario
Fabien Gélinas – Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University
Published April 22,
On January 27, 2018, Jane Bailey, Jacquie Burkell and Fabien Gélinas hosted a panel titled E-access to Justice during a session on the same topic at the Technologies of Justice Conference, held at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
Fundamental Values in a Technologized Age of Efficiency: Justice Values and Digitization
Jane Bailey discussed the Cyber Justice Project, a multi-disciplinary study on whether we can improve justice using information communications technologies. She explained how the Cyber Justice Lab creates technology and software to work with and help form new technologies in the justice system. Jane posed the question, “What do we mean by access to justice?” and asked how we can support people to solve the problems they have using technology. She described the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and legal technology, explaining how it can help by saving time and resources in justice as well as in testing and assessing justice. She spoke about the need for privacy and online access to justice technologies.
Troubling the Technological Imperative: Views on Responsible Implementation of Courtroom Technologies
Jacquie Burkell explained the idea that technology is "dragging courtrooms into a digital age" and spoke about the need to bring a positive relationship to courtroom technology. She talked about the balance of justice and privacy and the idea of a neutral forum, with emphasis on public awareness and use.
She described how technology is now used on a courtroom-by-courtroom basis, and how the implementation of technology needs to expand. She explained how trained intermediaries are often used in cases of the technology, and how literacy and literacy levels of technology can become technological barriers of access, increasing the technological divide. She talked about the need for national and international implementation self-assessment and exemplified the use of gamification of content with an interest in using tablets in court and deliberation.
Continuity and Technological Change in Justice: New Procedural Models
Fabien Gélinas explained how the effect of technology use in justice can sometimes be less significant than one would hope: a mere drop of water in the ocean. He spoke about technology's use in dispute resolution in the online and AI spheres, and the hope that technology can help resolve long-standing problems in the justice community. He described how justice and access to justice can be resistant to change, and how they often use the law as a stabilizer and tool for predictability in dispute resolution. He illustrated the need to be coherent, and how a change in the field can affect this coherence. He also spoke on privatization in law and the possibilities of deep mind projects and law in AI, describing how law can relate to current technologies. He showed the move from reconciliation to litigation and how this illustrates the difficulties of courts acting as stabilizers during the process of change. He urged his listeners to move the conversation to the use of technology to increase access to awareness and understanding of the law and available legal remedies, and suggested that perhaps the future use of AI would help people understand law and remedies in legal situations.
