Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons^™

Public Records Aren't Public: Systemic Barriers To Measuring Court Functioning & Equity, Kat Albrecht, Kaitlyn Filip

CJC Publications

In a new era of computational legal scholarship, computational tools exist with the capacity to quickly and efficiently reveal hidden inequalities in the justice system. Technically, the laws exist that legally entitle the public to the requisite court records. However, the opaque bureaucracy of the courts prevents us from connecting the public to documents they technically own. We exemplify this legal ethical problem by investigating areas of law where codified protections against inequalities exist and where computational tools could help us understand if those protections are being enforced. In general, the computational requirements of such projects needn't be complex, making …