e-Justice: A Bottom-Up Venue to Promote Open Justice? A Heuristic Analysis Based on Agent-Based Modelling

Abstract

Over the past decade, all around the world, it has been widely witnessed the courts attempt to switch from paper to electronic filing, expecting to improve efficiency and gain the means for transparency and for bringing adjudication practices under public eyes. This is what we call the e-justice transformation. The evaluation of its efficacies is an area of interest for the law and justice administration research communities, and, of course, for practising lawyers too. Considering recent developments in the Chinese e-justice transformation, the author is also concerned about projecting and evaluating their effects on open justice issues. I will use agent-based modeling as a tool for this. In order to avoid turning the parameter space into something unwieldy huge, I resorted to a number of well-founded assumptions and scenarios. I harvested them from tenets in diverse-disciplinary literatures. In doing so I attempted to manage the balance between the Scylla of oversimplification and the Charybdis of too much detail remains a real conundrum. The results can be considered worth-while for the offer they provide to the current debate: (i) the tenets of four different disciplines can use this paper as an introduction to the design of behavioral models of communities with deliberate agents, (ii) the topic of investigation is key for current debate, as all legal systems have to face the threats that datafication, social media and the dynamics of irreconcilable cult-carrying convictions breed – even the abuse of open justice functionalities. Finally, the paper suggests that (iii) no single discipline, single jurisdiction, single market or single culture will be able to adequately face such threats on its own.