What Is Lost When Justice Moves Online?

This chapter considers what is lost when justice moves online. More specifically it addresses the benefits of legal hearings being treated as synonymous with special places, collective ceremonies, rituals, and materiality. The implications of this will be explored in relation to the significance of co-presence, the engendering of a sense of civic occasion, as well as the exercise of State power and its impact on the sensory and psychological quality of interactions. It will reflect on what is lost when the courtroom or hearing room becomes dispersed or transformed into a series of mundane private spaces which people arrive at, and depart from, at the click of a button. The chapter makes two arguments. Firstly, the arrival of online justice heralds a retreat of the State from the civic sphere. Secondly, the shift primarily serves those with political, cultural and social capital, and renders more intense the divide between the digitally empowered and the digitally left behind.