When people are instinctively troubled by remote courts, however, they are often not thinking of the highest courts in the land but of everyday criminal cases. Many feel it important to have a public physical space in which, to borrow from Lord Denning, society can express its "emphatic denunciation" of crimes. Before the crisis, there was little debate over the suitability of remote methods for full criminal trials. But when court buildings closed, attention quickly shifted to alternative ways of hearing criminal cases. In the spirit of the moment, many lawyers and judges recognized that remote hearings could serve well enough for preliminary and procedural matters.
After all, video links from prisons to courts for bail hearings and remand hearings have been used for many years. For lesser offenses, without juries, it has also been conceded, although by no means universally, that trials might be conducted by video . Many options are on the table around the world, such as trial by judge alone, trials with smaller juries, substitution of juries by lay magistrates, and relocation to massive rooms to accommodate socially distanced jurors. On the strength of several months of remote courts, many lawyers and judges are now insisting we will never go back, that the transition to technology-based justice has been achieved.
The leap from physical courts to remote hearings has, of course, been remarkable, but it is very early days and no one can sensibly claim that they are suitable for all cases and issues. We are at the foothills of the transformation in court services. Settlementwhen property is bestowed, usually by a will or a deed, on a trust for the benefit of people decided by the settlor.
When the shares are first made available by the company, people can apply to buy them. The company states the price it wants for the shares.Share certificatea document which certifies who owns shares in a Company. It gives the type and number of shares owned by the shareholder and lists the serial numbers of the shares.Share premium accountan account in a set of books recording the extra amount over face value that shares have been issued for. If shares are issued for more than their face value, the extra amount over face value is called a share premium.Sheriffsomeone appointed each year by the Crown to be a county's senior officer. To be eligible for the office the person must own some land in the county.
The areas of the law which come within the sheriff's jurisdiction are largely dealt with by the under-sheriff.Shopliftingstealing goods from a shop.Shorthold tenancya tenancy under which the law allows the landlord to repossess the house.Sine dieindefinitely. If a case has been adjourned sine die no date has been set for it to be continued. (This term is Latin.)Slandersaying something untrue about a person or doing something, such as making a gesture, which damages their reputation.Small claims courta section of the county court which deals with small claims.
There is a simplified way of making a claim in the county court in a civil case where the claim is for no more than £5000 (or £1000 in personal injury cases). Neither side can claim costs.Smugglingimporting or exporting goods illegally to avoid a ban on them or to avoid the duties on them.Sold notea note that shows details of investments which have been sold, including the sale price and any charges taken. Stockbrokers produce sold notes for their clients.Solicitinga prostitute attempting to get clients in a street or other public place.Solicitora person who can deal with legal matters for the public and give advice on legal matters. All solicitors are listed on the roll of solicitors kept by the Law Society.Some solicitors can appear for their clients in some of the lower courts. What lessons can be said to have been learned so far, even if our study of remote courts is in its early stages?
In the broadest of terms, we should immediately acknowledge just how adaptable and resourceful judges and lawyers can be—when events and conditions require a major shift. The conventional wisdom is that the legal profession is deeply conservative and almost incapable of change. The evidence that can be gleaned from Remote Courts Worldwide suggests otherwise, with remote courts up and running in 56 countries by mid-July 2020. In many of these jurisdictions, judges and lawyers have rapidly put in place a rich new set of rules, procedures, protocols, and practice directions to enable court service to continue.
And with little training and support, many of these same judges and lawyers have swiftly ascended the learning curve and become competent users of video technology. Some, of course, have been more tentative and have preferred to conduct court work in their comfort zone of audio hearings , but the feedback so far suggests this to be an inferior medium. The legal professions in countries that had already embarked on court digitization projects, by and large, seem to have found it easier to adapt than those that had not. In Online Courts and the Future of Justice, I introduced the related but broader concept of online courts, which I characterized in terms of two basic services. The first is online judging, which is an asynchronous process involving human judges receiving arguments and evidence in electronic form and delivering their decisions in kind—with no oral hearings, either in physical courtrooms or by video.
This corresponds with the third form of hearing—the paper hearing—in my earlier classification of remote hearings. I continue to believe that this will come to be regarded as the most proportionate and convenient form of hearing for many cases. This move to online judging will be a much greater leap than the move from courtrooms to video hearings. The main objections to remote courts, so far, have been framed as threats to open justice and procedural justice. It has been argued, in short, that remote hearings are insufficiently transparent and indeed are not fair hearings.
I think it balanced to conclude, from the research thus far, that most judges and lawyers who have actually participated in remote hearings do not share these concerns. Experience of using the systems in practice has often changed views. Notably, many critics who voice concerns do so from armchairs rather than personal involvement in remote hearings.
Case notes cover new decisions on trafficked persons, the overpaid tax litigation and illegality in tort post-Patel. A review essay examines a new book on judicial private law remedies, and book reviews cover new titles on topics from international legal theory to constituent power to a First Nations 'Voice to Parliament' in the Australian Constitution. On the other hand, certain types of disputes are emerging as well suited to remote handling—interim, procedural, and interlocutory hearings; routine family work; small money claims; minor criminal offences; commercial disputes; administrative tribunals; civil appeals; and more. Contrary to early thinking about online dispute resolution, it is mistaken to believe that remote hearings are ideally suited to high-volume, low-margin cases, while traditional physical courts are the places in which to argue and settle the lower volumes of high-value cases.
There is no direct mapping between the value of a case and its suitability for remote treatment. A low-value case can raise highly sensitive personal issues that might best be handled in person. A low-value case can also raise very challenging legal questions. Nonetheless, there are a number of fledgling attempts to monitor developments and evaluate progress. We launched this on March 27, 2020, four days after the prime minister of the United Kingdom declared a nationwide lockdown. Remote Courts Worldwide () is a website designed to help the global community of justice workers—judges, lawyers, court officials, litigants, court technologists—to share their experiences of remote alternatives to traditional court hearings.
The service is a joint effort, hosted by the Society for Computers and Law, funded by Lawtech UK, and supported by Her Majesty's Courts & Tribunals Service. The FDA's review of new tobacco products before they can be legally marketed is required by statute and ensures that new products meet the standard Congress set in the law to protect the public health. Because the Agency found the necessary, product-specific evidence absent in each of these applications, the FDA issued MDOs. Essentially, this would be an exhaustive efficiency review, resulting, for example, in the substitution of remote hearings for physical hearings, not as an emergency measure but as a matter of course. This exercise would differ from almost all current digitization programs in not simply grafting technology onto existing processes but in optimizing the processes in the first place.
Informally, the idea here is to act on and, again, industrialize the current instinct of many judges, lawyers, and officials ("we could surely use many of these temporary techniques much more widely"). This must be a large, coordinated effort, across an entire system. I suggest that the first step is to run a pilot in one particular area. The third challenge, the long-standing one, flows from an alarming truth—that even in justice systems that we regard as the most advanced, dispute resolution in public courts generally takes too long, costs too much, and the process is unintelligible to all but lawyers.
In the most general terms, we call this the "access to justice" problem. But whatever explanation is preferred, the unvarnished reality is that most people on our planet cannot afford to enforce their legal entitlements in public courts. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, only 46 percent of human beings live under the protection of the law. Lawyers can sometimes use legal terminology with the quick ease of familiarity. But a good criminal lawyer will give you a clear explanation of each step in the criminal justice process, so that you are well informed about all the possibilities of how your case may unfold, and so that you can make the important decisions about how you wish to proceed. They will have little time or funding for ambitious extensions to their remit.
In the coming years, we will find many online techniques for dissolving and diverting disputes. Extended court services, as introduced in Online Courts and the Future of Justice, are one type of front-end. In the book, I argued strongly that these extended court facilities should be part of the public court service and not outsourced to the private sector.
In other words, I made the case for these front-ends to be a public service. If new and emerging techniques can widen access to justice, I said, then surely the state should embrace these and in so doing demonstrate that public courts are adaptable, flexible, and continue to be relevant as society becomes increasingly digital. Not only should this help enhance confidence in the public justice system, but it should retain the positioning of courts at the center of legal dispute resolution.
If the rule of law is to be maintained, courts must surely play a central and not peripheral, role in the settlement of legal disputes. To take an extreme example, in Brazil there is a backlog of around 80 million cases—even before the virus took hold. It is inconceivable that these will all be settled using judges and lawyers, whether in physical or remote courts, and whether or not there are improvements in, say, their case management and calendaring systems. Even in jurisdictions with smaller backlogs, it is highly improbable that these can be handled simply by turbocharging the existing system or holding more video hearings. On the contrary, there have been clear difficulties, for instance, for elderly as well as young parties, for those requiring translation, and for court users with poor internet connection. There have also been concerns about privacy and security on some of the video platforms.
Interestingly, early instincts that remote courts might impede open justice have generally not been supported. Indeed, many report that video hearings are more accessible than conventional courts, both to the public and the media. Across multiple constitutional contexts, courts frequently allow small localities to look beyond their borders and exclude particular facilities, yet typically prohibit large cities from doing that exact same thing. A tailored approach thus appears to privilege the self-determination of small localities over that of big cities, with potentially partisan political consequences. I find it helpful to regard the developments of the last few months as a huge unscheduled pilot, a great experiment in the use of a variety of technologies in our courts. They were inspired by the need to keep our court services afloat, but they should also cast light on possible futures for our courts.
But if this is indeed an experiment, we should be systematically and rigorously collecting data about timings, volumes, technologies, applications, and users (lawyers and clients, both represented and self-represented) and their experiences. Thus far, in the melee of keeping courts operational, the gathering of data about the performance of remote courts has been modest and uneven. There is another mindset issue here, one that relates more specifically to technology. When most lawyers and judges think of technology, they think of automation.
They have in mind the introduction of systems to streamline and improve some preexisting, often inefficient, working practices. Technology, on this view, is grafted onto long-standing legal and court processes. The first 50 years of legal and court technology were devoted in this way to automating the practice of law and the administration of justice. In the middle of March 2020, court buildings around the world began to close in response to the rapid spread of a newly identified coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 (the "virus"). Within days, alternative ways of delivering court service were put in place in many jurisdictions.
The uptake of various technologies, especially video, was accelerated in the justice systems of numerous countries. A progress review hearing could affect your freedom and your future. That is why it is a good idea to seek the help of an experienced criminal defense attorney to represent you at a progress review hearing. At Wallin & Klarich, our skilled and knowledgeable attorneys have been successfully representing clients at progress review hearings and in probation matters for more than 40 years. Legislation notes cover the Stewardship Code, and cases examine new decisions on unconscionability in arbitration clauses and police surveillance and automatic facial recognition in Wales.
Reviews cover books on justice in transactions and short reviews on titles covering theories of possession to a history of intellectual property through objects to the philosophical foundations of labour law, and many others. Over the last year, the agency has worked to review premarket applications for millions of products. In making this determination, the impact of such products on youth initiation and use is a critical consideration.
The rationale here should be clear—to cope with backlogs and to increase access to justice, we have to find new ways for people to handle their disputes. At the same time, my hope is that these front-ends would be more accessible to people with legal grievances, if only to help them understand the law, as it applies to them. Instead, in advocating the extension to courts, I am proposing that we build "front-ends" and slot these, as the wording suggests, in front of our conventional court services. I am importing the term "front-ends" from the world of technology .
The fundamental idea here is that we insert a new set of services and processes that are made available to people in dispute before they should need to call upon the traditional adjudicatory service of the court, whether physical or remote. The aim here is either to dissolve or divert simmering legal disagreements. Although the industrialization of remote courts may appear radical to many judges and lawyers, I regard it as but a first step in our migration away from the settlement of legal disputes exclusively in physical spaces. In Online Courts and the Future of Justice, I argued, in this spirit, that one promising answer to the access-to-justice problem is to use technology to transform court service. Simply carrying on with the automation of our courts would simply yield "mess for less." This would be to optimize a process that is no longer fit for purpose, no matter how well it is polished. On publication, my book was well enough received by the legal technology and legal innovation communities.
But it is always harder to convince the wider legal and judicial establishment of the case for change. If the trial is by jury, the jury must first be chosen and then empaneled. The Commonwealth's Attorney goes first, as they have the burden of proof to prove the person guilty. They call witnesses and present evidence such as pictures, items, weapons, laboratory reports and trial aids. After the Commonwealth is finished putting on evidence the Defense Lawyer may make a motion to try to get some or all of the charges dismissed, by arguing that the Commonwealth has not proven it's case against the person.
If there are charges that remain after this, the Defense Lawyer then puts on witnesses and presents his evidence. After the Defense is finished, the Commonwealth has the opportunity to present rebuttal evidence, and may call witnesses to the stand and present other evidence again. Once both parties are finished presenting evidence, the attorneys argue the facts that were presented, which facts the judge or jury should believe, and how those facts apply to the law. After arguments are made by both sides the judge or jury will render a verdict of guilty or not guilty.
Sometimes the jury can not reach a verdict, and this hung jury results in a mistrial. After a mistrial the Commonwealth's Attorney can try the case again with a different jury. Words of artwords which have a fixed meaning in law so that their use in a legal document can have only one interpretation.Writan order issued by a court telling someone to do something or not to do something. (This has been known as a 'claim form' since April 1999).Writ of executiona type of writ ('claim form' since April 1999) used when a court judgement needs enforcing.Writ of summonsa type of writ ('claim form' since April 1999) used to start a civil case in the High Court. Matrimonial homethe house that a husband and wife live in as a married couple.Mediationhelp from an independent person to solve differences between a husband and wife whose marriage has broken down. The mediator helps them to agree what should be done about their children, money and so on.Memorandum and articles of associationThe memorandum gives details of a company's name, objects and share capital.
It also sets out the limits of the shareholders' liability if thecompany has to be wound up. The articles set out the members' rights and the directors' powers.Mens reathe intent to commit a crime and also the knowledge that an act is wrong. An example would be a tenant failing to leave the property when the tenancy finished.It is also the profits lost by a landowner when wrongly deprived of the use of his or her land. When somebody is put on probation the Judge will give that person certain terms and conditions of their probation that they have to follow and sometimes that means they actually have to do some things. For example, they've got to do community service, Cal Trans, community labor, the PAWS program.
There are all sorts of things that can be ordered depending on what the crime is and what the prosecutors and Judge think will benefit the person, and also what your criminal defense attorney works out for you. Our skilled criminal defense lawyers will contact you to make sure you are aware of your upcoming progress review hearing so that you do not miss it. If you have a valid reason for not being able to attend your progress review hearing, our lawyers at Wallin & Klarich will work with the court to try to reschedule the hearing.
