Daniel Ghezelbash, Keyvan Dorostkar, Saul Wodak and Robert Ross

In the age of ‘big data’, governments and corporations are using data analytics to evaluate and improve programs and services across a wide range of areas. The courts have been relatively immune to this trend — but the tide may finally be turning.

The recent Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) Report on judicial impartiality includes ground-breaking findings and recommendations on how data can be used to promote judicial impartiality and public confidence in the legal system. The Report’s 14 recommendations draw on research from the fields of law and social science to formulate strategies to address these issues at an institutional level. A number of these recommendations focus on the role data can play in promoting transparency and judicial impartiality. This includes collecting data on court users’ subjective perceptions of procedural justice (recommendation 12) and collecting and reporting statistics regarding the diversity of the federal judiciary (recommendation 8).