Digitalising courts, reshaping justice? Boundaries and infrastructure in researching court technology

In this article, we do two things: first, we suggest a methodological approach, using our multidisciplinary study on court digitalisation as an example; and second, we recount and summarise the substantive results of our study in order to convince (especially the legal scholars) on the usefulness of our approach. To examine the effects of digital technologies on the administration of justice, we set up a multi-year case study on the development of AIPA, the new IT system for general courts and prosecutors’ offices in Finland. Methodologically, following a Science and Technology Studies (STS) framework, our research group treated this specific technical artefact, AIPA, as our common boundary object to organise research. We approached the boundary object together from our distinct doctrinal, socio-legal, and STS perspectives. Through an iterative research design, we employed grounded theory as an approach to build concepts directly through data collection and analysis. Substantively, we assessed court digitalisation through AIPA by combining legal, textual, and empirical analysis based on interviews. By examining the boundaries and tensions at the individual, organisational, and systemic levels, we demonstrate how the meanings and implications of digital technologies in courts are continuously renegotiated among various actors. Additionally, we identify what we call “legislative silence”: a situation in which digitalisation efforts appear to require no legislative changes in procedural norms and are not perceived to be constrained by existing laws. Our findings suggest that court digitalisation efforts should be considered infrastructural developments rather than simply the creation of new tools or administrative practices, and are thus constitutive of the administration of justice in its entirety.