Open justice in the political economy of visibility: Governing the gaze in platform-mediated courtrooms

This essay examines how the principle of open justice is reconfigured under conditions of platform-mediated visibility. While openness has long been understood as a democratic safeguard, socio-legal and media scholarship shows that visibility is never neutral but staged, mediated, and institutionally structured. Positioned as a conceptual intervention into debates about media, visibility, and public authority, the essay argues that contemporary open justice operates within a political economy of visibility, in which judicial legitimacy is increasingly shaped by the infrastructures that organise how courtroom images circulate, attract attention, and generate value. Rather than focussing on courtroom access and transparency, the essay examines the conditions under which judicial visibility is produced, circulated, and monetised. Drawing on the 2022 Depp–Heard defamation trial in Fairfax County, Virginia, as an analytically revealing US case, it shows how such trials unfold within platform environments structured by algorithmic ranking, metricisation, and monetisation, where visibility functions as a regulated resource rather than a simple guarantee of transparency. The essay develops a conceptual lens for understanding how judicial authority is co-produced by courts, media institutions, platforms, and networked publics. It concludes that justice today is increasingly governed through the organised conditions of its appearance.