Data Politics: How the French Legal Profession Renegotiated Judicial Transparency (2016-2023)

Abstract Worldwide, the legal profession is grappling with how deeply to embrace the datafication of law. Drawing on interviews and the public record, this article offers a case study of how France’s 2016 Law for a Digital Republic—which promised public release of all judicial decisions—exposed divisions within the French legal profession over technology, big data, and identity. A heated debate over “predictive justice” ( justice prédictive ) mobilized competing coalitions, ultimately resulting in France becoming the first country to ban data analytics that reveal the identity of individual judges in 2019. For scholars of the legal profession, this episode highlights how legal professionals serve as gatekeepers of technological change and, in the process, reshape law-related cultural scripts central to national identity. For scholars interested in big data, the French case reminds us that the datafication of law is not an inexorable force, but rather a contested political process. And for those interested in court administration, France’s experience offers insight into how one early-moving jurisdiction re-negotiated the boundaries of privacy and judicial transparency for the twenty-first century.