The Martin Felsky Award was created to honour Dr. Martin Felsky, who served on the CanLII board as both a member and chair, for his commitment to access to legal information in Canada. The Award recognizes Canadian contributions related to legal research or legal technology that are published in open access journals.
Prof. McGill and Dr. Salyzyn’s paper “Judging by the Numbers: Judicial Analytics, the Justice System and its Stakeholders” considers the impact that judicial analytics may have on the public, the judiciary and the legal profession. Judicial analytics involves the use of advanced technologies, like machine learning and natural language processing, to quickly analyze publicly available data about judges and judicial decision-making. While, in Canada, judicial analytics tools are as yet at the early stages of development and use, such tools are likely to become more powerful, more accurate and more accessible in the near-to-medium future, resulting in unprecedented public insight into judges and the work of judging. This article identifies possible benefits, including increased transparency into the work of judging, and risks, including the propagation of inaccurate or misleading information about judges. The article suggests that voluntary third-party certification and the production of credible public tools can provide meaningful ways to balance these benefits and risks and calls on judicial regulators to consider how information made available through judicial analytics tools may influence their work.
Read the paper here.
Congratulations to Prof. McGill and Dr. Salyzyn!