Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Digitalisation in the context of the administrative justice system presents a wide variety of issues. The case studies in this book have demonstrated that. It is essential that the ongoing incursion of digital technology into administrative justice is not seen as some distinct field of interest and activity, but as part of the core business of those concerned with public law and administrative justice. There will be no satisfying overall answer or theory that can be developed in response to this incursion. In administrative justice, generalisations are often unhelpful and rarely true. Different instances of digitalisation – whether they are imposed as part of public service provision or arise organically from technological innovation – need to be considered in their particular institutional and political contexts.
Given this, this book has sought to provide a framework for analysing unfolding developments in the digitalisation of administrative justice, and not an overarching prescriptive theory. It has argued that analysis must reflect on how developments with digital technology fit into the central and long-stranding administrative justice concerns of evidence, politics, models and design. It has highlighted the urgent need to study closely the empirical consequences of technology and revisit, and maybe even abandon, existing frameworks for understanding how administrative justice operates. By outlining this path forwards, I am essentially re-stating what Richard B. Stewart wrote at the end of his famous 1975 essay, ‘The reformation of American administrative law’, considering the role of administrative law in the context of a changing US state and polity: ‘[g]iven “the undefined foreboding of something unknown,” we can know only that we must spurn superficial analysis and simplistic remedies, girding ourselves to shoulder, for the indefinite future, the intellectual and social burdens of a dense complexity.’
Judicial review is the system through which an individual ought to be able to go to a court and ask for a review of whether state action in respect of a certain issue is lawful. If the answer is no, there are various remedies the court can deploy to ensure government complies with the law. In performing this role, the courts are often said to be doing the job of upholding the Rule of Law. This simple account of judicial review is, as Harry Street once observed, ‘a nice idea … but we just don’t have it.’ This has been so for a range of reasons in recent history. Perhaps the primary failing of the present judicial review system is one of expense: judicial review is a ‘Rolls-Royce’ process that few can afford. This state of affairs was recently described as ‘public law’s disgrace.’ have started to use crowdfunding platforms to raise money in order to bring judicial review claims.4 Crowdfunded claims have included high-profile ‘public interest’ challenges on new policies relating to junior doctors’ pay and the triggering of Brexit under Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union. Although there is an increasing volume of crowdfunded judicial reviews, little has been said about this change – a shift which is, essentially, citizens using technology to gain access to an administrative justice processes in a way they may not have otherwise been able to.
In this chapter I explain how crowdfunding works and the changes in practice we have seen in recent years, particularly in relation to public interest judicial review cases.
The administrative justice system is the mechanism through which government makes decisions about citizens’ rights and entitlements (in respect of, for example, social security, immigration and housing), and the processes through which people can challenge those decisions (for example, through judicial review, ombuds and tribunals). By scale, administration is by far the largest part of the state: it is where high-level policy discussions transform into the street-level coercion of citizens. Like many other areas of law, society and government, administrative justice is now beginning to see the impacts of rapid technological advances. Early attempts at ‘E-government’ and using ‘ICT’ are now accelerating towards the emergence of the digital administrative state, and the prophecies of futurologists are being put to the test. The essential promise of technology remains, as it always has done, of more and better for less effort. The fundamental concern also remains the same; that by using new technology, we alienate older methods – and their benefits – that we ought to be preserving. Looking at the present situation surrounding the developing digitalisation of administrative justice, it is clear that some new political dynamics are emerging as a result of recent changes. Activists are using online crowdfunding platforms to fund challenges to the policies of the government in the courts, advancing their campaigns through social media. At the same time, a Conservative government – pursuing a long-term programme of fiscal austerity in response to the global financial crisis of 2008 – is attempting the most ambitious digitalisation of courts and tribunals ever seen.
The recent MoJ and HMCTS digitalisation reforms, discussed in Chapter Three, have been developed primarily as an operational project. That is to say that, despite the reforms representing a major change to justice processes, there is expected to be comparatively little by way of substantive changes to the law (at least in the foreseeable future). The existing law will instead be given new practical enacting frameworks. This approach means that responsibility for deliberating on and developing digital processes has been left largely with civil servants within HMCTS and the MoJ, with Parliament only providing a ‘drip-feed’ of legislative activity and oversight thus far. Other developments in the digitalisation of administrative justice – such as the increasing use of automated processes in public sector decision-making – have seen similar patterns. At the core of the story of how digital technology is impacting administrative justice is therefore civil servants, their approach to process design and the government’s own IT capabilities.
One key trend in administrative justice design in UK central government is that it is increasingly influenced by ‘agile’ or ‘design-thinking’ approaches. This method is underpinning how many online administrative justice systems, including online tribunals, are being constructed, and is being widely promoted by leading technologists in government. Although many lawyers will not be familiar with it, design thinking is now a well-established field of study in its own right. The premise is that design as a cognitive process – a ‘more interpretative, intuitive mind-set that characterizes the arts and creative professions’ – does not have to focus on products alone but can be extended to other fields.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Exploring how justice is delivered at a time of rapid technological transformation, Justice in the Digital State exposes urgent issues surrounding the modernisation of courts and tribunals whilst examining the effects of technology on established systems. Case studies investigate the rise of crowdfunded judicial reviews, the digitalisation of tribunals and the rise of ‘agile’ methodologies in building administrative justice systems. Joe Tomlinson’s cutting-edge research offers an authoritative and much-needed guide for navigating through the challenges of digital disruption.
As the role of technology steadily grows in justice systems around the world, the UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and HMCTS have taken the step of being global pioneers. They are now in the process of putting many court and tribunal processes – as well as court administration systems – on to a digital footing. Tribunals – which hear many more challenges to the decisions of public authorities than the courts do via judicial review – are a major focus of these changes. Reforms to tribunals are expected to involve tribunal appeals being lodged, and potentially determined, online, with the idea of parties coming into contact with each other and a judge at an earlier stage than before. The changes is a government drive to cut the running costs of the justice system. As such, new online procedures are being coupled with court closures and significant reductions in the amount of court staff. While there is hope that online processes may increase access to justice for many, there is also concern that some may be digitally excluded from justice. At the same time, there is a worry that new online processes will not compensate adequately for reduced service provision in respect of traditional processes. Overall, these reforms represent a major policy gamble by a government under pressure to reduce costs: the gamble that technology-based solutions can provide more access to justice for significantly less money.
Tribunal reform is starting in the Social Security and Child Support Tribunal (SSCS) and then moving on to the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum) Chamber (FtTIAC).
