E-JUSTICE FOR THE ITALIAN PUBLIC PROSECUTOR OFFICES

All around Europe, large investments have been done to project, develop and implement new information and communication technologies (ICT) in the justice sector. ICT has often been presented by policy makers to the public as a powerful tool to introduce and support changes, but also as an element of modernization per se, as the key for “bringing the justice administration into the modern age”. As recent studies seem to shows, this is not always the case. This paper study ICT innovation in the Italian public prosecutor offices (PPOs), illustrating how organizational constraints have affected the deployment of the systems. During the last 20 years, the Italian Ministry of Justice has launched a large number of projects that cover almost every task performed by PPOs. A description of the Italian judicial ICT history and of the most relevant and interesting experiences will be provided. The mix of failures and successful deployments will provide the occasion for a meaningful reflection on the innovation approaches adopted in this very complex and highly regulated environment. The work is based on data collected thorough a research project funded by the European Commission and through several case studies focused on specific applications and carried out through the years by the researchers of the Italian Research Institute on Judicial Systems (IRSIG-CNR). Such researches have been conducted with a qualitative interdisciplinary approach, based on direct observation of practices in action and informal interviews, coupled with an analysis of formal documentation

Cross-border Civil Litigation in the EU: What Can We Learn From COVID-19 Emergency National e-Justice Experiences?

Free movement of people, goods, services, and capital in Europe requires well-functioning cross-border dispute resolution mechanisms. Many initiatives have been taken over time by the EU institutions and Member States, both introducing legal instruments and developing information and e-justice technologies to support cross-border judicial litigation and cooperation. Unfortunately, the results so far achieved do not seem to be adequate to the needs of our increasingly inter-connected society. Adding to this, the first wave of COVID-19 emergency measures brought court-based dispute resolution to a grinding halt. All around Europe, court buildings have been closed to the public, hearings suspended, and only emergency cases carried out. Some hope though seems to come from this bleak moment. The breakdown of existing practices, and the need to ensure the justice service provision required for our societies' functioning, resulted in many local and national initiatives to reconfigure the justice service. It provided the occasion to experiment with remote justice service provision and explore possibilities to reconfigure technologies and tools, which in many cases had been available for years, to permit remote working, hearings and legal communication. While most of the experiences have been carried out within the national boundaries, they provide the occasion for rethinking cross-border judicial procedures outside their traditional schemas. Building on this, taking stock of pre-COVID-19 EU cross border judicial services situation, this paper explores EU Member States e-justice emergency measures and attempts to stimulate the discussion on their potential for innovation in cross border judicial proceedings

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

Editorial Note: An Introduction to the EQPAM Special Issue on Legal Requirements for Complex Sociotechnical Systems

This Special Issue of the European Quarterly of Political Attitudes and Mentalities (EQPAM) presents a collection of papers contributing to the understanding of the increasingly relevant topic of legal requirements analysis and engineering in complex sociotechnical contexts, with an eye to the complex intertwining between law and technological systems development and implementation for the public service provision

Improving Access to Courts and Access to Justice in Cross-border Litigation: Lessons from EU Experiences

Seeking to guarantee both citizens and companies the possibility to defend and enforce their rights in a Europe of open borders, a number of EU legal instruments have been adopted to support access to justice in cross-border litigation. Several years into their application, key questions remain to be answered. Do these instruments actually facilitate parties’ access to courts and justice? What are the problems encountered in practice and which are the envisaged solutions? What are the reasons why European procedural instruments are rarely used? Through quantitative and qualitative data, the paper explores the legal practitioners’ experience with European instruments, and their perception of the usefulness and usability of these instruments dedicated to cross-border litigation. Furthermore, the analysis seeks to determine whether these instruments succeed in facilitating parties’ access to courts in a transnational setting, and looks into the use of information and communication technology as an additional means contributing to achieving justic

Justice systems and ICT What can be learned from Europe?

The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) opens up new opportunities to significantly improve the administration of justice. The availability of web services, the use of electronic filing, the electronic exchange of legal documents, the possibility of on-line legislation and case law are only some examples that are spurring judicial administrations around the world to rethink their current functions and activities. ICT can be used to enhance efficiency, access, timeliness, transparency and accountability, thus helping judiciaries to provide adequate services. As many empirical examples show, this is, however, not always the case. The interaction between technology and highly regulated organisations, such as courts, may often lead to unexpected results. Europe, with its different institutional settings and experiences, allows the exploration of a variety of solutions that can be implemented to support the administration of justice. Most importantly, it also provides the opportunities for a unique insight into the dynamics and problems that may characterize such experiences. This article seeks to provide an empirically derived account on the uses of ICT within the courts and for judicial data interchange. The article is based on data collected through several research projects by the Research Institute on Judicial Systems of the Italian National Research Council, in partnership with other European institutions, including Universities and Ministries of Justice

Justice systems and ICT<br> What can be learned from Europe?

The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) opens up new opportunities to significantly improve the administration of justice. The availability of web services, the use of electronic filing, the electronic exchange of legal documents, the possibility of on-line legislation and case law are only some examples that are spurring judicial administrations around the world to rethink their current functions and activities. ICT can be used to enhance efficiency, access, timeliness, transparency and accountability, thus helping judiciaries to provide adequate services. As many empirical examples show, this is, however, not always the case. The interaction between technology and highly regulated organisations, such as courts, may often lead to unexpected results. Europe, with its different institutional settings and experiences, allows the exploration of a variety of solutions that can be implemented to support the administration of justice. Most importantly, it also provides the opportunities for a unique insight into the dynamics and problems that may characterize such experiences. This article seeks to provide an empirically derived account on the uses of ICT within the courts and for judicial data interchange. The article is based on data collected through several research projects by the Research Institute on Judicial Systems of the Italian National Research Council, in partnership with other European institutions, including Universities and Ministries of Justice

Electronic Access to Justice: From Theory to Practice and Back

Recent empirical researches are showing that e-justice systems are built linking and reshaping heterogeneous components, building blocks of technological, organizational and normative nature. The new comes not much from inventing out of the blue and developing from scratch but form reusing, copying, adapting and hooking together existing components. At the same time, new actors, such as technological partners and network providers make their appearance. Power and organizational borders alter, as ‘who-does-what’ changes in the translation of procedures from paper to digital and from one form of digital to another. Traditional ICT development and innovation management approaches have serious problems in coping with this complexity. Indeed, new theories are called for. Through the experience of several empirical case studies, this paper looks at e-justice dynamics and ramifications in the attempt to tackle its multi-faced complexity. The purpose is twofold: on the one hand, stimulating the academic discourse on a growingly relevant topic, on the other hand enriching the reflection of practitioners in the perspective of e-justice innovation to support access to justice -and appeal to court- focusing on the specific area of environmental matters

In Search of Smartness: The EU e-Justice Challenge

At the EU level, an increasing number of resources are being invested in an attempt to provide better public services through the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). While new tools are being designed and implemented, a shift from ‘traditional’ technologies that must be used to provide services to more interactive ‘smart’ technologies is beginning to take place. At the same time, an adequate understanding of the implications of this shift is still missing. This paper focuses on the EU e-Justice experience with the ‘API-for-Justice’ project, which investigates the challenges of opening up the European e-Justice Digital Service Infrastructure to external service providers by means of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In particular, the exploration of potential services that can be provided by third parties through APIs for Justice shows the potential for a radical redesign of the justice service provision, where, for example, justice services are not requested by the party but are proposed or initiated by smart components of the infrastructure on the basis of inputs from the environment. In this perspective, smart technology research and, in particular, Brenner (2007)’s discussion on law and smart technology help to uncover the still unclear dynamics of change that characterize one of the key pillars of modern society: justice

Electronic Access to Justice: From Theory to Practice and Back

Recent empirical researches are showing that e-justice systems are built linking and reshaping heterogeneous components, building blocks of technological, organizational and normative nature. The new comes not much from inventing out of the blue and developing from scratch but form reusing, copying, adapting and hooking together existing components. At the same time, new actors, such as technological partners and network providers make their appearance. Power and organizational borders alter, as ‘who-does-what’ changes in the translation of procedures from paper to digital and from one form of digital to another. Traditional ICT development and innovation management approaches have serious problems in coping with this complexity. Indeed, new theories are called for. Through the experience of several empirical case studies, this paper looks at e-justice dynamics and ramifications in the attempt to tackle its multi-faced complexity. The purpose is twofold: on the one hand, stimulating the academic discourse on a growingly relevant topic, on the other hand enriching the reflection of practitioners in the perspective of e-justice innovation to support access to justice -and appeal to court- focusing on the specific area of environmental matters.Les recherches empiriques récentes montrent que les systèmes de justice électronique (e-justice) sont construits par la liaison et le remodelage de composants hétérogènes, de nature tant technologique qu’organisationnelle ou normative. La nouveauté résulte de la réutilisation, de la copie, de l’adaptation et de la mise ensemble de blocs préexistants. Dans le même temps, de nouveaux acteurs tels que les partenaires technologiques ou les fournisseurs de réseaux ont fait leur apparition. Les rapports de pouvoir et les cloisonnements organisationnels ont un impact, dans la mesure où le « qui fait quoi » change lorsque les procédures basculent du support papier vers le support numérique ou quand elles changent de support numérique. Les approches traditionnelles dans le domaine de la gestion de l’innovation et du développement des technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC) ont de sérieux problèmes  pour traiter de cette complexité. D’où la nécessité de faire appel à de nouvelles théories. A l’aide d’expériences portant sur plusieurs études de cas empiriques, ce texte analyse comment les dynamiques et les ramifications de la justice électronique abordent les multiples facettes de cette complexité. Le projet est double : d’un côté il s’agit de stimuler le discours académique sur un questionnement pertinent qui se développe de plus en plus, et de l’autre côté il s’agit d’enrichir les réflexions des praticiens dans la perspective de rendre plus innovante la justice électronique dans le sens d’un meilleur accès à la justice – et notamment des appels et des pourvois. Notre texte est étayé sur des cas portant sur des questions spécifiques de l’environnement