Eyes on the Horizon Karen Eltis, Courts, Litigants and the Digital Age: Law, Ethics and Practice (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2012), pp 135. ISBN 978-1-55221-233-2

The digital age, the time of enormous cultural change we are living in right now, is relentlessly affecting all of our institutions, forms of communication, and social habits. The title of Karen Eltis’s book, Courts, Litigants and the Digital Age: Law, Ethics and Practice, signals that she is addressing current issues in our justice system arising from this technological shift. It was a pleasure to read such a thoughtful, nuanced, and broadly informed book. Eltis brings to her writing considerable intellectual resources, her previous work on privacy and security, and her in-depth knowledge and training in comparative law. I found myself oddly moved—odd because it is a rare experience to be moved when reading professional legal writing, with its typically dispassionate probing of questions and commitment to exhaustive citation to other legal texts. So I, a scholar, not legally trained, who writes about aspects of the law in the context of digitally mediated culture, was surprised. This slender book gently appeals for engagement with new circumstances within the discourses of the legal profession. I am sure many readers who are participants and not just observers in justice systems will find this book useful too, for it raises truly important questions, contains clear explanations, and makes recommendations for policy. This book is principally about readers and writers of text, and some issues of uncertainty introduced to texts by the digital world: instability, the problems of authentication and the general lack of error correction, gatekeeping (and its absence), and the temptations of the virtual worlds we visit. Eltis’s analysis does not particularly probe the role of the massive influx of pictures into legal discourses, and she does not take on multimedia. Because this book is a call to engage, I will take the reviewer’s prerogative and raise some concerns not dealt with directly by the author, expand on some issues that are only sparingly referred to (probably for reasons of space) but which are important to consider, and I will explain—later—why I was moved. But first, I will give readers of this review an all-too-brief summary of the scope of Eltis’s book. Courts, litigants, the digital age, law, ethics, practice—these are global terms, and while her work touches upon all of them, Eltis has wisely narrowed her discussion to what can be effectively covered in a short book clearly intended for those who have—or should have—a professional interest in the issues it raises and little time to wade through a large monograph. The language is accessible, and nonlegal readers may well find it very interesting to read about the Internet’s impact on courts and judges, juries, (by implication) lawyers, and court administration, even if the author’s targeted readership is inside those institutions. What, in her view, has the digital age in particular conferred on courts? Eltis’s answer involves a knot of interrelated issues pertaining to privacy, security, and publicity, as digitized legal text becomes widely available and as judges, litigants, and the public (some of whom become jurors) use social media, creating a new kind of text that can have consequences for the legal system. Legal texts are not behind walls, and neither are social media texts. Ready access to the vast library of the Internet confers new research abilities on all, including on judges. How can the Internet serve justice and not undermine it when courts are sites of the controlled revelation of facts that are tested? Should judges do background research on facts related to cases before them? What about jurors, perhaps tempted to do their own Internet searches and use social media while serving on a trial? Information, …