Digital trials, people’s attention and the right to a public trial

Abstract

Recent technological advances and changes in social and professional norms prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a worldwide increase in digital legal trials. Digital trials, also known as online, remote or virtual trials refer to any legal trial hearing where trial participants and individual members of the public participate or attend digitally and from physically separate spaces. Digital trials raise an important challenge when it comes to protecting the right to a public trial. In this chapter, we examine whether digital trials are compatible with the right to a public trial. Specifically, we outline a normative conception whereby we argue that the right to a public trial protects citizens’ interests, that trials receive adequate public attention, and rely on this conception to provide a digital ethnographic analysis of the effects that a specific digital trial case – Cayla Griffin v. Albanese Enterprise, Inc., D/B/A Paradise (2020) – has on our attention as proxy members of the public. Albeit narrow and tentative, our study suggests that, at least in their current form, digital trials undermine the public’s attention, and need to be redesigned before they can be legitimately used in jurisdictions where the right to a public trial matters.