Neocolonial Digitality: Analyzing Digital Legal Databases Using Legal Pluralism

Abstract

A prevalent assumption is that digital legal databases generate an exhaustive and inclusive archive for academics and legal professionals to use for gathering information. Bridging theories and methods from digital media studies and legal anthropology, I challenge this assumption and demonstrate how digitizing law is a politicized process that is tied to legacies of colonialism and modern epistemic frameworks of law and justice. Employing the concept of legal pluralism, I conduct a comparative study of urban secular state courts and rural Islamic/customary non-state courts (shalish) in Bangladesh to show how the construction of digital legal databases distorts and erases alternate frameworks of law and women’s socio-legal experiences. I discuss two significant use of digital legal databases to highlight why it is important to study the gaps and prejudices: (1) they are central to generating new forms of archives—digital archives; (2) they provide the data sets to help train artificial intelligence and influence automated outputs. I develop the term “neocolonial digitality” to explain how power related to legacies of colonialism and other forms of discrimination are embedded in the digitizing process. This concept also holds space for the newer forms of hierarchies, exclusions, and power structures that digitality permits, focusing on the particular harms marginalized communities encounter in the Global South.