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EXPERT OPINIONS AUGUST 10, 2020 ¦ 41

mend you read some of the stories or watch some vate ADR settlement between him and his accusers.
of the videos posted by lawyers and court officials My other concern is accessibility. E-platforms
from more than 50 countries at Remote Courts are incredibly efficacious, and lawyers and judges
Worldwide (www.remotecourts.org). equipped with what my friend Joe Sweeney used to
In remaking our systems, I think we need to call “powerful computers” can push terabytes of data
avoid the old “NIH” (not invented here) stumbling onto platforms where skilled technicians can eas-
block and be open to rethinking a lot of what we ily decide complicated issues. But what of the huge
do and how we do it. Simply putting everything swath of the public with little or no computer access,
online, which Susskind calls the “same mess for or who live in a place without high-speed Internet?
less” approach, is not going to work. We should My colleague Corey Brinson has been bitten by
be open and humble enough to learn from others. the Access to Justice bug, and we recently wrote
As Susskind notes, there are seven key require- about the idea of court guides/advisors/ombud-
ments for a successful court system: substantive and spersons to usher the uninitiated through the
procedural due process, openness, accessibility, process when Legal Aid and others have resources
proportionality, enforceability and sustainability. to help but a few. The Covid Catastrophe is go-
Some are easier to translate to ing to result in huge amounts
new service-delivery modali- of consumer debt, eviction and
ties than others, and while close foreclosure cases. You can’t ex-
enough may be good enough for pect someone to participate in
some, others will require careful Adapting centuries-old an online proceeding from their
planning. For my money, open- processes to a virtual car or using the computer at the
ness and accessibility may be the environment overnight is library, even if the libraries were
real challenges. akin, as Susskind notes, open. How are those people go-
to changing a wheel on a ing to find help, and if they do,
Many have already comment- how does that work in remote
ed on the idea promoted by the moving car.

late Judge Mark Kravitz that the courts?
death of the jury trial will be the Much of my thinking relates
death of the common law, as to civil and administrative law.
without a fresh supply of cases and controversies to I can’t even begin to think about the complexi-
be decided by successive generations of judges and ties related to confronting one’s criminal accuser
lawyers, the law may become stale and irrelevant. on-line and how a jury in a “Zoom Room” would
While Kravitz was writing about the damage private decide life and death issues. Susskind quotes some-
ADR was doing by drying up the well of new ideas, one called Lord Devlin who wrote “Trial by jury
the same problem will be encountered if everything is more than an instrument of justice…it is the
migrates from public fora onto and into e-platforms. lamp that shows that freedom lives.” If that lamp
A collateral issue related to open courts is what is replaced by the glow of a computer screen, we’ll
one judge called the “loss of majesty” attendant have lost something important beyond measure.
upon reducing every human dispute to ones and Former state Chief Disciplinary Counsel Mark
zeroes. One important concern for courts is that Dubois recently completed a year teaching at the
they maintain the faith, trust and support of the University of Connecticut School of Law.
public. Reasoned discussion of the #MeToo phe- ¦

nomenon was more advanced by the public trial Mark Dubois is a CLT columnist and former
and sentencing of Harvey Weinstein than the pri- state Chief Disciplinary Counsel.

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