Reflecting the past year

Beginning of August 2019, I uploaded four new articles to my publications page. They are a reflection on what happened during the past year. The first article, called De legal tech van de rechtspraak (the courts' legal tech), in Dutch, was a contribution to the Legal Tech special of Computerrecht, published in April 2018.  I could not upload it here sooner because of restrictions imposed by the publisher. It is a description of the state of court IT in the Netherlands judiciary in the spring of 2018. However, in June 2018, the Judicial Council decided not to implement the digital procedure for commercial claims. The Council also decided to discontinue the Quality and Innovation (Q&I) Program. This development left me quite speechless for a while. But when, in November 2018, The Tijdschrift voor Internetrecht asked me to reflect on the lessons from the Q&I program, I produced another article in Dutch, Lessen leren uit KEI (Learning lessons from Q&I) published in January 2019. Meanwhile, I had acted as a speaker at a number of conferences on Court IT. I generally held about the same presentation on court IT and its pitfalls. I summarized the presentation in an article in English: Digital justice, nice to have but hard to achieve. I publish an early draft of it here, since its official publication is still pending. This article presents both the legal tech from the first article and the lessons from the second one, as well as some conclusions on ways forward for court IT. On a more positive note, I took part in the ongoing discourse on the ethics of artificial intelligence. This resulted in a contribution to a special edition of Les Cahiers de la Justice, on Les Défis de la justice numerique (The challenges of digital justice). This article, Quelle place pour l'intelligence artificielle dans le processus de décision d'un juge (the place of artificial intelligence in the judicial decision process), is the French version of my earlier paper for the Netherlands Parliament, also on the publications page.