THE QUESTION OF THE CIRCULATION OF AGENCY IN TWO JUDICIAL INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURES

The longitudinal study of two judicial information infrastructures offers the opportunity to investigate the factors at the basis of their development. Specifically, in the public sector, it is not sufficient to follow design principles and implementation strategies proposed by the current literature. On the contrary, these principles and strategies can represent an obstacle to the circulation of agency or the capacity to produce legal effects to the electronic transmission of digital documents and information

THE QUESTION OF THE CIRCULATION OF AGENCY IN TWO IN JUDICIAL INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURES

The literature on information infrastructures (Ole Hanseth & Lyytinen, 2010) has elaborated principles to be followed for their development. However, according to Aanestad and Jensen (2011), these principles do not emphasize the role of involved stakeholders specifically whether the infrastructures are the result of nation-wide government projects. So, the focus is posed on stakeholders’ mobilization and coordination as further factors to take into account. The analysis of two judicial information infrastructures suggests that a further factor contributes to the development of information infrastructures: the circulation of agency or those conditions that allow to online proceedings to acquire legal validity. The fact that online procedures do not determine legal effects is not fundamental in the business environment where the efficiency rationale prevails. Conversely, this is decisive in the judiciary and in other sectors of the public administration due to the risk to build well functioning online proceedings with no legal valu

Great Success that Was on the Brink of Failure: The Case of a Techno-Legal Assemblage in the "Civil Trial On-Line" System in Italy

In the last twenty years, Italy has made massive investments in ICT projects in an attempt to improve the ‘quality of justice’. ‘More technology’ was considered the mantra policy to save justice from a never-ending state of crisis. These huge investments resulted in a highly sophisticated e-justice system, with full dematerialization of the civil justice procedures. However, this success did not take place automatically and without costs, as initially expected

ICT Development and Business Process Modelling in the Legal Domain: The Experience of e-CODEX

In the last 30 years, the use of ICT spread into the justice sector with the aim of improving performances and reducing costs. While the justice domain has many distinctive features that makes ICT development and deployment particularly complex compared to other domains, design techniques and methods that proved to be successful in the broader ICT world, have been more and more introduced and tested in this difficult environment. This paper focuses on Business and Process Modelling (BPM) methodology, as a way to navigate the legal, organizational and social complexity of developing e-Justice services. First born for the analysis and improvement of private business processes through the use of graphical representations, the methodology has been largely utilized also for software design in complex organizations. After introducing the main literature on the BPM, we present the case of e-CODEX EU co-funded project, which developed an e-delivery platform to allow secure cross border exchange of judicial documents. The analysis allows grasping some of the strengths and limits of this method, and to learn important lessons on the relationship between BPMs’ use and the legal performativity of e-justice

Performing the Union: the Prüm Decision and the European dream

In 2005, seven European countries signed the so-called Prüm Treaty to increase transnational collaboration in combating international crime, terrorism and illegal immigration. Three years later, the Treaty was adopted into EU law. EU member countries are obliged to have systems in place to allow authorities of other member states access to nationally held data on DNA, fingerprints, and vehicles by August 2011. In this paper, we discuss the conditions of possibility for the Prüm network to emerge, and argue that rather than a linear story of technological and political convergence and harmonisation, the (hi)story of Prüm is heterogeneous and patchy. This is reflected also in the early stages of implementing the Prüm Decision which proves to be more difficult than it was hoped by the drivers of the Prüm process. In this sense, the Prüm network sits uncomfortably with success stories of forensic science (many of which served the goal of justifying the expansion of technological and surveillance systems). Instead of telling a story of heroic science, the story of Prüm articulates the European dream: One in which goods, services, and people live and travel freely and securely

The patterning of finance/security : a designerly walkthrough of challenger banking apps

Culture is being ‘appified’. Diverse, pre-existing everyday activities are being redesigned so they happen with and through apps. While apps are often encountered as equivalent icons in apps stores or digital devices, the processes of appification – that is, the actions required to turn something into an app – vary significantly. In this article, we offer a comparative analysis of a number of ‘challenger’ banking apps in the United Kingdom. As a retail service, banking is highly regulated and banks must take steps to identify and verify their customers before entering a retail relationship. Once established, this ‘secured’ financial identity underpins a lot of everyday economic activity. Adopting the method of the walkthrough analysis, we study the specific ways these processes of identifying and verifying the identity of the customer (now the user) occur through user onboarding. We argue that banking apps provide a unique way of binding the user to an identity, one that combines the affordances of smart phones with the techniques, knowledge and patterns of user experience design. With the appification of banking, we see new processes of security folded into the everyday experience of apps. Our analysis shows how these binding identities are achieved through what we refer to as the patterning of finance/security. This patterning is significant, moreover, given its availability for wider circulation beyond the context of retail banking apps