Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Public Records Are Not Public: Data Accessibility Barriers to Court System Change

Thu, Nov 17, 8:00 to 9:20am, L401, Lobby Level

Abstract

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.

We argue that the current system of public records places the burden on the public when requesting the court transcripts that are necessary to reveal the frequency of racially motivated peremptory strikes. By building a comprehensive process audit database of over 3,000 county courts, this project reveals that these theoretically public records are extremely difficult to obtain due to systematic missingness, varied procedures of receipt for a legally identical process, financial burdens, and heightened required knowledge to initiate searches in the first place. This means that a relatively simple computational project, requiring only basic natural language processing, is stymied by court processes that turn accessing public records into an insurmountable barrier.

Authors