Volume 8 Issue 2

Cyber Courts: Using the Internet to Assist Court Processes

ALLISON STANFIELD*

The paper examines the ways in which courts are beginning to use computer technology and the Internet to handle their increasing workloads. It looks at both the potential of the new technologies to enable the courts to work more efficiently and the problems to which they give rise. Areas examined include the electronic filing of documents and appeal books, medium neutral citations of legal materials, the advantages of electronic materials for legal research, moves to develop virtual court rooms and to use on-line systems as a way of making information and evidence available to the parties to litigation both inside and outside the court room and schemes to give the public access to computer terminals programmed to help them prepare legal documents in areas such as divorce, small claims, landlord and tenant and enforcement of judgments. Finally the paper raises some of the issues of principle which have to be determined to enable the technologies to be used to their fullest potential, issues such as the conflict between the right of the public to have unlimited access to legal materials and the rights of litigants to privacy, the need to ensure that information kept in court records is kept secure, reconciling the interest of the public in free, unrestricted access to legal materials with that of the government in selling such information as a way of recouping some of the costs of maintaining the legal system and the threat to public access posed by the Crown’s claim to copyright in legislation and the decisions of the courts.

** Research Librarian, University of Sydney Law Library; Librarian, ATAX (Australian Taxation Studies Program), Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales.