Digital Inequalities and Access to Justice

Abstract

The gravest public health challenge in a century has disrupted and transformed our civil justice system. In the span of weeks, courts across the country were forced to make countless, rapid, and difficult decisions. Many courts suspended in-person hearings and moved proceedings to online platforms, such as Zoom. While a shift to virtual courts has been lauded by technological enthusiasts and reformers for decades, little research has examined how this technological change may affect vulnerable unrepresented persons and low-income people in the United States on the "have-not" side of the digital divide.In this chapter, we seek to cast light on how virtual proceedings unfold for these low-income unrepresented persons in the everyday. It is important to do so. To date, much of the conversation has lauded Zoom court proceedings as the future of civil justice, centering this praise on idealized forms of online proceedings and their conveniences, without interrogating the impact of the precarity that low-income people contend with or persistent digital divides.In marked departure, we examine how these new technologies affect the experiences of low-income unrepresented persons who encounter, and contend with, adversities within virtual court proceedings. We examine how these new technologies reconfigure the features, affordances, and barriers present within the civil justice system, and the impact of these new technologies on the psychology of judges, lawyers, and unrepresented persons, as well as the impact of these new technologies on the meaning of the judicial role and on a person's unrepresented status. As political theorist of science and technology Langdon Winner observes, "[i]f the We are incredibly grateful to Nora Al Haider and Rachel Wang for their help designing and administering this study, and to the research assistants who helped by observing the virtual hearings involved in this preliminary study, including