Open Justice

Open justice is a growing movement to use new technologies, including big data, digital platforms, blockchain and more, to improve our legal system by making the workings of our legal institutions easier to understand, scrutinize and, we hope, improve. Thanks to new tools the opportunity to make improvements has never been greater. This course is designed to help the public entrepreneur – passionate individuals like you. Whether you are a lawyer, a judge, a technologist or just a concerned citizen – the course will help you to use new technologies to take action to increase efficiency, improve equity, fight corruption and enhance legitimacy in the third branch of government.

Instead of long lectures, this online course consists of ten short modules which will serve as brief introductions to different aspects of open justice. These ‘mini-lectures’ of ten minutes each are combined with interviews with leading practitioners from around the world who are collecting the data, conducting the analysis, creating the apps, and building the movement that helps us all to better know and assert our rights.

We wish to acknowledge the Commission of the Mexican Federal Electoral Court as the founder of this MOOC.

1. From Transparency to Open Data and Open Justice - what is open justice, what is the value proposition?
2. Open Justice Technologies and The Mindset of the Public Entrepreneur - open justice as the pathway to innovating public value
3. Open Justice for Efficiency - covering data driven projects designed to help courts increase throughput and efficiency
4. Open Justice for Equity - covering data driven projects designed to improve public policy outcomes
5. Open Justice for Legitimacy - covering projects designed to improve the selection and oversight of judges and other officials
6. Open Justice against Corruption - covering judicial transparency projects designed to reduce corruption
7. Open Justice Collaborations - covering participation, engagement and inter-agency collaboration projects
8. Open Justice Projects: Problem Definition - here we focus on advancing your own open justice project by helping you to define the problem you are solving specifically and concretely.
9. Open Justice Project: Risks - in this module, we address the risks with open justice projects and how to overcome them.
10. Open Justice Projects: Implementation - finally, we discuss strategies for taking your open justice project from idea to implementation.

Each module comprises a short video accompanied by a written primer expanding on the material in the video, including more in-depth case studies. Most of the modules also include video interviews with open justice innovators and demos of successful and pioneering open justice platforms.

Finally, when you have learned what open justice is and how people are putting new technology to work around the world to improve their justice systems, we reserve three modules at the end of the course that will help you launch your own project.