5 - Technology and the Judicial Role

Summary

Technology is often seen as having transformational capacity to improve societal institutions, and the judiciary has not been an exception to this trend. For a number of years, courts around the world have invested in digital uplift projects. Beyond the routine use of technology to improve judicial systems, which is widely accepted and largely self-explanatory, many jurisdictions are increasingly investigating more sophisticated applications. Governments and courts are asking whether and to what extent machine learning techniques and other artificial intelligence applications should play a role in assisting tribunals and judiciary in decision making. In this chapter, we ask how these new uses of technology might, in turn, impact judicial values and judges’ own sense of themselves, and even transform the judicial role in contemporary societies. We do this through a focused examination of core judicial values, namely transparency and accountability, independence, impartiality, diversity and efficiency and how they may be either supported or undermined by increasing technologization.