Book reviews: August 2021

Edited by Siddharth Peter De Souza, Maximilian Spohr

PUBLISHER: EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS
ISBN: 9781474473866
PRICE: £95

We know, of course, that we should never let a good crisis go to waste. And so it has been with the global COVID-19 pandemic, and the ensuing acceleration of the digitisation of the justice system. But at some point, one hopes, we will move out of crisis mode, and even past recovery mode, and will be able to properly contemplate whether the increased use of technology has wrought any long-term benefits to the practice of law beyond adding the words “YOU'RE ON MUTE!” to the glossary of legal terms with which every practitioner needs to be familiar.

In particular, as advocates for greater use of technology have been arguing for years, there is little point in contenting ourselves with the replication of existing structures, or congratulating ourselves on digitising a bad system: technology offers us the possibility of a critical appraisal of what we mean by justice – and access to it – followed by a systemic and wide-ranging revolution in the way in which justice is delivered.

And this process can only be improved by books such as Technology, Innovation, and Access to Justice: an impressively wide-ranging collection of essays which seeks to describe some of the changes which have already been made, or are in contemplation, in various jurisdictions; to assess whether these changes have enhanced access to justice; and to examine how to address challenges which might arise as we go forward.

The value of a book such as this is undoubtedly reinforced by the international and multi-disciplinary nature of its contributors, introducing the reader to developments and proposals with which they may not be familiar. I was, for example, intrigued by the proposal by Cedric Vanleenhove, an academic in Belgium, that social media could be used as a means of service where more conventional routes had failed: we might perhaps regard it as trite that people are more likely to check their social media accounts than the walls of their local court, or a website where such intimations might be made. It seems to me that we can only be better off for reading former senior judge Dory Reiling on the creation and operation of the Dutch digital justice system that she helped to design. And if you ever wondered in what way the 90s cult toy Tamagotchi is relevant to digital justice, Gianluca Sgueo of New York University – Florence is here to explain it to you. (Spoiler: it’s to do with incorporating elements of game design into non-game contexts, thus improving engagement.)

I also enjoyed Maeve Lavelle's lucid and entertaining analysis of what the legal profession might do to prepare itself for the oncoming changes to the way in which legal services are accessed and delivered, particularly as – needless to say – we do come in for a tiny bit of a kicking here and there in this book. It is, apparently, “just not in the nature of lawyers to pursue technological innovation”. We “resist changes, resist new technologies, and do not want to fix what [we] do not see as broken”. And, according to a Canadian study referred to here, we do not like being told what to do, do not like hearing that we could be doing it better or differently, and are more than likely to argue about it.

Well, perhaps we could plead guilty to one or two of these charges. And it might be this inbuilt scepticism which meant that I was drawn to the clear-eyed realism of Roger Smith of London South Bank University and the University of Kent who, in examining four examples of digital justice from around the world, concludes that “the potential full promise of each has not yet been met”. Crucially, in my view, he reminds us of the existence of “the digital divide”: the fact that “there will be a percentage of every population of every country which will not be able to take advantage of digital means of communication”. For them, he concludes, “there need to be alternatives”. To this I would add the need to bear in mind that while public and unfettered access to primary sources, such as legislation, is undoubtedly a good thing, this does not necessarily lead to knowledge, still less expertise. And that we need to bear in mind our own wellbeing, as well as that of our clients: are we designed for long-term remote or solitary working?

Perhaps inevitably, much of the discussion in this book echoes the work of Richard Susskind, the charismatic megafauna of the world of digital justice: although Susskind himself is not a contributor to this book, he is cited frequently and reverentially, and the reader who is interested in these issues might profitably move on to his work, or for that matter start there. This collection, meantime, represents an invaluable contribution to our state of knowledge about developments in relation to digital justice. I would imagine that just about all of us would be better informed for reading it.

David A Dickson