Open Judicial Data: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Open data gained considerable traction in government, nonprofit, and profit organizations in the last several years. Open judicial data increase transparency of the judiciary and are an integral part of open justice. This article identifies relevant judicial data set types, reviews widely used open government data evaluation methodologies, selects a methodology for evaluating judicial data sets, uses the methodology to evaluate openness of judicial data sets in chosen countries, and suggests actions to improve efficiency and effectiveness of open data initiatives. Our findings show that judicial data sets should at least include court decisions, case registers, filed document records, and statistical data. The Global Open Data Index methodology is the most suitable for the task. We suggest considering actions to enable more effective and efficient opening of judicial data sets, including publishing legal documents and legal data in standardized machine-readable formats, assigning standardized metadata to the published documents and data sets, providing both programmable and bulk access to documents and data, explicitly publishing licenses which apply to them in a machine-readable format, and introducing a centralized portal enabling retrieval and browsing of open data sets from a single source.