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113 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/jclc113 and id is 1 raw text is: 0091-4169/23/11301-0001 THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW & CRIMINOLOGY Vol. 113, No. 1 Copyright © 2023 by Kat Albrecht & Kaitlyn Filip Printed in U.S.A. CRIMINAL LAW PUBLIC RECORDS AREN'T PUBLIC: SYSTEMIC BARRIERS TO MEASURING COURT FUNCTIONING & EQUITY KAT ALBRECHT* & KAITLYN FILIP** In a new era of computational legal scholarship, computational tools exist with the capacity to quickly and efficiently reveal hidden inequalities in the criminal legal system. Technically, laws exist that legally entitle the public to the requisite court records. However, the opaque bureaucracy of courts prevents us from connecting the public to documents they have a right to access. We exemplify this legal ethical problem by investigating areas of law where codified protections against inequalities exist and where computational tools could help us understand if those protections are being enforced. In general, the computational requirements of such projects needn't be complex, making them even more attractive as solutions for auditing legal system processes. Using the backdrop of a national audit of public records policies to retrieve criminal jury trial transcripts, we establish the impossibility of securing the public records needed to quantify the illegal use of racially motivated peremptory strikes. We argue that the lack of opacity or availability of these policies serve as a bottleneck to the relatively simple computational process of quantifying previously unknown language and events in criminal jury trials. This Article considers the ethical implications of the lack of access to records that are legally public and Kat Albrecht is Assistant Professor at Georgia State University in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. ** Kaitlyn Filip is a Law & Humanities Fellow at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and a JD-PhD Student in Communication Studies: Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University. For advice and comments, the authors are grateful to have presented this work at the 2022 Computational Legal Studies Conference at Singapore Management University, March 2-4, 2022. 1