Access To Judgments Online In Amercia And Its Enlightment To China

Along with the gradual judicial reform in China, making judgments online available has attracted both academic and practical attention. As the new president of the Supreme Court, Zhou Qiang put forward to deepen the open courts, the most urgent and realistic breakthrough is the use of modern information technologies to put the open judicial commitment come true and make the judicial available. Network is the most effective way to achieve the convenient to the public. The Supreme Court enacted The Opinion of The Three Judicial Open Platforms’ Construction on November21,2013, announcing that the Supreme Court would built the trial process open platform, the judgments open platform and the enforcement open platform step by step.As a guiding document, The Opinion of The Three Judicial Open Platforms’ Construction does not show the judgment open platform in details. In fact, even the Supreme Court has yet to find the suitable project on this and needs to learn from the countries which occupy the advanced position in this field. In America, accessing to judgments online has not only a well-established legal system, but also a comparatively complete practice, which is a very good learning model to us.Before sorting out the good from the bad, it is important to realize how the judgments online is available to the public in America. Similar to our judgments open platform in America is the PACER system, which has long been a leader in the field of judgments access in America, so the PACER system is worth for us to analysis and reference. Although the state courts judgments access system is not as good as PACER, some still have blinking ideas and access methods. The first part of this paper gives details on the history of American judgment access tradition. Firstly, the paper positions the public access to judgments as a long-standing common law right. Then introduces the changes of the access from paper to web, especially refers to the E-government movement which played an important role in promoting the development.The second part introduces the content of the system of accessing judgments online. Due to the double-track judicial system, federal and states court systems have different policies and procedures in judgment access. This part will focus on the PACER system, giving details on the scope and content of the accessible judgments as well as the registration, searching and billing procedures about PACER.The third part focuses on one of the key issues of the U.S. accessing court judgments online-the adversarial relations between access to court judgments online and the privacy protected by laws. Starting with the general Internet privacy concerns and the law’s response, the analysis centers on the particular field of the Internet privacy, that is the privacy of the parties in online judgments available to the public. Then this section will discuss some real problems that pose threats to the privacy of the parties, such as engaging in criminal activity after collecting the parties’ private information, selling the aggregated information and so on.Following the logic of the third part, the fourth part carries out the legislative proposals and the development trends of the court in order to solve the above-mentioned issues.Fifth part reposition the viewing on the judgments open platform aggressively built by the Supreme Court, suggesting that we should adopt advanced experiences about the basis platform and specific programs in accessing court judgments online in America.The article concludes when learning the advanced experiences of the United States, we still have to consider the current development of law in our society as the foundation of the benefit measure, and it is also necessary to combine the judicial reform practices in recent years for finding the suitable path to the court judgments access online. Then the operation of the judicial system will be more efficient, accessible, and humane.