European analysis needed!
Volume 6 Issue 1 of the online journal of Law, Technology & Society SRIPTed includes a paper that considers access to Court information for the purposes of independent research and analysis. Section 6.6 of the paper titled Re-Use of Public Section Information (PSI) briefly refers to the European Union Directive on the re-use of public sector information and the UK transposition.
We discuss the limitations and rights which may affect the researcher’s access to and use of digital, court and administrative tribunal based information. We suggest that there is a need for a European-wide investigation of the legal framework which affects the researcher who might wish to utilise this form of information. A Europeanwide context is required because much of the relevant law is European rather than national, but much of the constraints are cultural. It is our thesis that research improves understanding and then improves practice as that understanding becomes part of public debate. If it is difficult to undertake research, then public debate about the court system – its effectiveness, its biases, its strengths – becomes constrained.
Access to court records is currently determined on a discretionary basis or on the basis of interpretation of rules of the court where these are challenged in legal proceedings. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that there are significant variations in the extent to which court documents such as pleadings, transcripts, affidavits etc are made generally accessible under court rules or as a result of litigation in different jurisdictions or, indeed, in different courts in the same jurisdiction. Such a lack of clarity can only encourage a chilling of what might otherwise be valuable research.
Courts are not, of course, democratic bodies. However, they are part of a democratic system and should, we suggest – both for the public benefit and for their proper operation – be accessible and criticisable by the independent researcher. The extent to which the independent researcher is enabled access is the subject of this article.
P Leith and M McDonagh, "New Technology and Researchers’ Access to Court and Tribunal Information: the need for European analysis", (2009) 6:1 SCRIPTed 33,
SCRIPTed is a high quality, online, international, interdisciplinary and multi-lingual journal of technologies and their interaction with the law and society. It publishes peer-reviewed articles as well as shorter analyses and case and legislation critiques, reports, book reviews, commentaries and art.
The Shepherd and Wedderburn Centre for Research in Intellectual Property and Technology (SCRIPT) was established at the University of Edinburgh in 1998 as a centre of excellence in the disciplines of intellectual property law (IP) and information technology law (IT).
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