![handle is hein.journals/cstlr26 and id is 1 raw text is:
DataInfrastructure as Court Architecture
THE COLUMBIA
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
LAW REVIEW
VOLUME XXVI STLR.ORG FALL 2024
ARTICLE
DATA INFRASTRUCTURE AS COURT ARCHITECTURE
Kat Albrecht*
Whether courts like it or not, digital legal data has become an important part
of both litigation and justice administration. Constitutionally protected as public
records, court data and court-adjacent data must be made transparent and
accessible to the general public. However, alongside considerations of how to make
court data accessible externally, so must we also consider how court data is
situated internally within courts. Conceptualizing data infrastructure as court
architecture reframes the importance of court data to better align with its current
utility in courts, while privileging the very real structural issues that courts must
contend with to ensure the continued health of data systems. This Article considers
the usefulness of data in the current terrain of law and justice, evaluates the
ecosystem of data products currently at play in all levels of courts, and offers
concrete pathways to data infrastructure development through Open Knowledge
Networks.
I. IN TR O D U C TIO N ............................................................................................ . 2
II. THE UTILITY OF DATA AND THE DEMANDS OF DATA SYSTEMS................... 3
A. Access to Data as Access to Justice.................................................... 3
B. How Data Availability Constrains Knowledge........................................ 5
* Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University in the Andrew Young
School of Policy Studies. She received her JD and PhD degrees from Northwestern University and
the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. At the time of this writing, she was also a fellow with
Georgetown University Law Center's Judicial Innovation Fellowship embedded within the
Hamilton County, Tennessee General Sessions Courts and an MFA student at the University of
Georgia. The author is grateful to the employees of the Hamilton County, Tennessee, General
Sessions courts, from whom she learned a great deal about what it means to be a court within a
community. She is also appreciative of the feedback and support from her cohort of Georgetown
Judicial Innovation Fellows Verenice Ramirez and Emily Lippolis.
2024]
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