ABSTRACT
This chapter draws attention to the ways in which the increasing use of technology in the courtroom has the potential to disrupt traditional concepts in court design and considers the claim that the courthouse, as the prime site of adversarial practice is in danger of being dematerialised. One of the key issues to be explored is whether or not this refl ects progress in our thinking about the interface between buildings and the trial. I argue that the promises of technology are contradictory and confusing. The new devices available to courts have the potential to disrupt some of the practices discussed in this book so far and to liberate participants in the trial from the strictures of tradition. At the same time, they can serve to radically alter the place of architecture, ritual and ceremony in preparing participants for their role in the legal arena. These changes call for more extensive public debate than has so far taken place. A key question here is whether the sort of trials now being imagined in which architecture appears to play an increasingly minor role render the process an ‘inauthentic’ legal ritual? It is certainly the case that in the new digitally mediated and virtual environments being envisaged, and slowly realised by policy makers and ‘techno-evangelicals’, the character and content of legal discourse is being transformed. Encounters within the courtroom are in danger of becoming sanitised as participation in the trial becomes akin to a fl eeting televisual encounter. Conceptions of the court as centrally located, locally anchored, spatially discrete and architecturally symbolic are also set to change. The result is a radical reorganisation of the challenges that ‘spatiality’ poses to law. It would seem that we are to be faced with a number of challenges to received concepts of the trial, all of which are worthy of extensive debate. The physical boundaries of the court have been breached in a number of new ways in recent years which render the surveillance technique of the judicial sightline rather meaningless. Real time transcription funded by one or both parties to the trial has made some participants in the trial invisible to the judge. By allowing a script of the proceedings to be transmitted to back room lawyers located miles away, invisible participants in the prosecution or defence case
can identify inconsistencies which can be communicated to counsel via email and seized upon in the course of ongoing cross examination. ‘Live link’ allows the evidence of witnesses to be transmitted from physical locations outside of the court without them having to enter the courthouse or courtroom.2 Filming of courtroom proceedings also allows images of the court to be consumed without the necessity of attending the public gallery. In their different ways these practices expand the concept of the witness stand, the area set aside for lawyers and the public gallery to a secure witness suite which may or may not be in the physical vicinity of the court, the offi ce of a well-resourced law fi rm and the homes of the public. As the walls of the courthouse are violated in the myriad of ways made possible by technology important questions about the unity of the drama of the trial and who produces images and controls the information highways which stretch the court beyond brick and mortar need to be addressed and their implications interrogated. The purpose of this chapter is not to bemoan the impact that technology is having on contemporary society. It is accepted that technology can enhance democratic participation by promoting discussion amongst the marginalised and geographically remote. Nor is an idealised vision of the trial as a just and fair method for the resolution of disputes entertained. As I have suggested in earlier chapters participation in a trial can be degrading and inhibiting, cross-examination brutal and the aftermath of proceedings traumatic. What is argued is that beneath the inadequacies of adversarial adjudication there may continue to be some design ideals enshrined in court practices which we want to retain in a technological age. In an era in which reform of the litigation system has been fuelled by considerations of effi ciency and proportionality, it is argued that we are in danger of forgetting that requiring the physical presence of people in a special building continues to have considerable cultural resonance. In the sections which follow these issues are discussed in relation to one particular development, the giving of evidence by live video link (live link). The argument is presented in two parts. In the fi rst section of the chapter, I consider the ways in which technology disrupts the experience of the trial when participants are able to ‘attend’ court by means of live link. The second section refl ects on whether the trial loses its potency as a public ritual when stripped of its physical surroundings. In earlier chapters I have rehearsed the many ways in which the positioning of walls, windows and stairwells have been used for many hundreds of years to prepare people for the drama of the trial and to designate place and hierarchy at law’s altar. The aim here is to unravel the implications of modern processes of fragmentation and loss of face-to-face transaction. The increasing use of live link forces us to reconsider the spatial organisation of social relations in the justice system and to rethink the unity of space and place assumed by our forebears. A major concern of this chapter is whether, as the old order of exclusive locations dissolves, inadequate discussion of the implications leaves justice placeless and disorientated.
