Justice Innovation
A presentation by Colin Rule, of Online Dispute Resolution fame, on a concept design for a mobile traditional justice platform. The m-Jirga program would mimic an elders council meeting in a town square or mosque, that would hear disputants’ sides of a conflict, then vote and issue a ruling on who will prevail.
The m-Jirga was proposed for a rural Afghan audience, but wasn’t ultimately implemented. As a concept design, it is a useful starting point. How might we design systems of justice — that lets a person bring a dispute with another, get a chance to advocate her position, and receive an enforceable ruling — that could be accessed on dumb mobile phones or basic smart phones?
And, how might we let people who are disadvantaged in traditional justice systems (likely: young women, minorities, very poor) present their position in semi-anonymous way, so that their typical disadvantage is erased?
For the excellent Legal Tech class I’m taking at Stanford Law School on the future of legal technology, I am proposing to build a WebMD for law.
My central question is ‘how might we build tech that could help a lay person diagnose their own legal problems’? I am asking it because most legal technology currently is being built for a few audience segments:
1) Big Law lawyers who want to cut costs and make their practice more efficient
2) Law students to do research and construct arguments better
3) Fairly well-educated consumers who want to accomplish discrete tasks — making a will, incorporating a business, getting a marriage or divorce agreement, electronically signing a contract
I am interested in getting legal services & counsel to people not in these three categories: those people who lack the legal grounding to know what their legal problems are, and how they can go about fixing them.
The target audience for ‘a WebMD for law’ would be people with a legal itch — they have a problem in their life that is worrying them, and they think it might be tied up with something to do with the law. Their dentist botched a root canal. Their landlord is asking for more money. Their employment interviewers are asking about immigration status. A policeman confiscated their camera at a protest.
There are many services currently online for people to look up statutes, cases, commentaries, and other sources of law. See Legal Information Institute, Google Scholar, PlainSite, Ravel Law, Wikipedia — and if you have money in your pocket, WestLaw and Lexis. But these legal tech products are not useful to a person unless she first knows what she is looking for.
There is a gaping need for a technology that can bridge the lay person from ‘I have a problem’ to ‘What is the law to help me with my problem’. This technology would provide the lay person with the understanding: ‘This is my problem in legal terms. These are the specific legal matters that are at issue’. It would do what first year law students spend all their free time doing: issue-spot.
I am interested in this for a wide variety of ‘lay people’. It would be best to support those who are most removed from the legal system, people who don’t have the money, time, proximity, or knowledge to access legal counsel & services. But it would also have enormous benefit to the many people who are well-educated, living relatively well, but when it comes to the law — feel totally out of their depth, don’t know a tort from a criminal action, and can’t navigate the jargon of the legal system.
These slides are from a presentation, “Is There a WebMD Effect: open access to law, the public, and the legal profession” up on SlideShare by a lawyer, T. Bruce, who was also thinking about the possibility of a WebMD for law. The presentation highlights that there is a need to serve this ‘latent legal market’ — while also warning that giving greater access to legal diagnosis tools may induce ‘cyberchondria’ in the general public.
People could find more legal issues in their lives than they actually have (or than actually matter), and this could have negative effects — overtaxing the legal system with more frivolous lawsuits, inducing people to seek costly legal help when in fact they do not need it, giving false confidence to people that they can represent themselves with their new legal knowledge.
This 15th century concern — that ‘reading the law without right understanding’ might lead to people harming themselves with legal knowledge — cannot be ignored. But it does not outweigh the need for a technology that can bridge people’s legal itchiness with a capacity to use the many legal resources now available online.
Sri Lankan tech researcher & TED fellow Sanjana Hattotuwa has laid out some of the basic capabilities that mobile phones in the field can be used in dispute resolution and rule of law.
Data gathering
Real time ODR
Offline ODR
Settlement process
A paper on “An Asian Perspective on Online Mediation” puts forward an agenda for making all the advances made in Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) transition to mobile devices. ODR had been desktop-based, but this isn’t relevant for the majority of the world, who do not have reliable access to dekstops, but who are regular users of mobile phones.
Sanaja Hattotuwa & Melissa Conley Tyler put forward some advice on what a Mobile Dispute Resolution system, aimed at Asian Pacific populations would look like:
Build specifically for smaller, more streamlined mobile devices
“ODR systems must treat the smaller form factor of mobile devices as an advantage, creating experiences that are designed to effectively make use of phone keypads and smaller screens, pervasive and user independent standard for data exchange between PC and non-PC devices, expert systems that intelligently manipulate information and deliver it in appropriate ways to users of the system, systems that use voice and video to facilitate virtual face-to-face (F2F) interactions and use internet radio to promote ADR mechanisms and most importantly, augment the capacity of existing ADR providers to engage with the complex socio-political issues that result from protracted conflict and peacebuilding.
Hide Complexity: Make the Tech Look Simple
“In creating new ODR systems for conflict transformation, the emphasis should firmly be on frameworks that hide the complexities of the technology and present users who with a human face for ODR. Such systems will engage communities rather than overwhelm them with sophisticated systems that bear little or no relation to the problems of their daily lives. Systems that are self-effacing and empower communities resolve conflicts on their own stem from a design perspective that is nourished by a recognising and acknowledging the needs of communities on the ground, as opposed to the imposition of high-end systems in a top-down approach.”
Follow the Community’s Needs & Aspirations
A priority is “defining ODR requirements and systems based on needs and priorities that have been expressed by the communities and users themselves, and not just articulated by political stakeholders or traditional power-centre.”
“ODR systems that don’t develop existing local capacities and instead impose architectures that are alien to target communities may well lead to new conflicts which in turn re-ignite dormant emotions, leading to a spiralling vortex of violence that runs counter to the intended goals of ODR itself”
Build ODR into the Existing Community Systems
Also necessary: “Embedding community-based ODR services within existing economic, governance and social structures, while at the same time creating opportunities for communities to use ODR systems to transcend regressive socio-political architectures and create new social contracts.”
A major problem in governance is the spread of misinformation and rumors. Sometimes these result from concerted campaigns by political actors, to manipulate politicians with rumors meant to make them suspicious or fearful about something. Other times rumors are not driven by anyone, but snowball on their own. Either way, flare-ups of rumors can wreak havoc on governance, personal security, community relations, and rule of law.
Misinformation can also be a problem regarding the law. With a proliferation of online forums and social media, people may get legal information from their peers that is incorrect. Can we use mobile tech to combat common misinformation and rumors, and spread quality and correct information?
Technology can be a carrier of rumors — see the unrest in the last Kenyan elections, when rumors sent by text fed into ethnic attacks, riots, and deaths. But there are some tech design projects which are trying to quell, staunch, and kill rumor campaigns to improve local governance and relations. A recent report by the USIP highlighted several of these in Afghanistan.
“Afghanistan has evolved rapidly as a test bed for mobile-based programs at the district level that have the potential to improve both communication with government officials and transparency. This is exemplified by the work done by the UK-managed Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), which has launched two mobile-based programs that deserve careful consideration for broader rollout in other districts: a specialized call-in radio program and a crime-reporting hotline. The team has demonstrated initial success in holding local government officials accountable for their response to emergencies and crime while engaging civil society anew, and the programs make for worthwhile case studies. Radio call-in shows are not new to Afghanistan. What distinguishes this weekly program in Helmand is the expanding audience it has, thanks to its regular use of provincial official as hosts who take questions from citizens about civil administration. The show is hosted on local station Bost and is funded by the UK government, which purchases commercial airtime for the show.
“Radio is the most popular and easy-to-use communication medium in Afghanistan, but call-in programs have had varying degrees of success. This show, however, has proved to be very popular by allowing provincial officials, who are constrained in their ability to travel because of security concerns and poor transport, to speak about the state of affairs in their sectors and address the concerns of constituents. Nick Lockwood of the Helmand PRT underscored the potential of this forum when he described a program that had led a senior police chief to make a number of changes to his unit in response to listeners’ complaints about corruption among his officers. Subsequent programs hosted by other district police chiefs benefited by attracting ever bigger audiences.
In an information-starved environment like Afghanistan, where such call-in programs meet with notable success, officials should also consider using an IVR-based news system to combat the rumors that can be so dangerous. In fact, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting launched its IVR-based news service around the September 2010 elections in Afghanistan. Its Cell Phone Voter Project provided users with a toll-free number to access news stories about the elections via their phones in Dari, Pashto, and English.”
“MobileActive.org’s Katrin Verclas, a pioneer in mobile phone deployments, pointed to Zimbabwe, where MobileActive.org had helped to implement an information system with features that could be adapted for similar purposes. On hearing of an event or news story, users can send an SMS to the system, which then replies with a phone call that provides accurate information about the event or news. Users can listen to messages in three different languages. In the first week of its implementation in Zimbabwe, this program received over three thousand phone calls and is helping to create a more politically engaged public.”
“Verclas further noted that mobile telephony is likely to be used more frequently in this way to raise awareness of critical issues of citizen concern, share documented stories of localcrime and corruption, record user responses to questions and prompts, and poll citizens about local issues. Lockwood of the Helmand PRT confirmed this observation in the Afghan context, indicating plans to explore ways of promoting the agenda, activities, and meetings of the District Community Councils (DCCs) as a way of creating a sense of ownership of the DCCs among their constituent populations and instilling a demand for services. USAID also has plans to create a service called Mobile Khabar (khabar means “news” in Dari and Pashto) to use mobile phones as a delivery system for news and information.”
The Internet Bar Organization has fielded a proposed design, the Internet Silk Road Initiative, that would use online and mobile tech to provide access to justice & dispute resolution capabilities to Afghanistan.
The project’s website is down now, indicating that perhaps the proposal has been shelved right now. But its ambit is of interest:
“The proposed Internet Silk Road project aims to provide a vitally important service to Afghan communities at a time when the need for clearly defined land tenure is a growing concern for both foreign and domestic interests in the country.
Our goal is to resolve Afghan land disputes by
1. investigating the effective and ineffective aspects of the dispute resolution systems currently in use,
2. collecting evidence related to potential disputes helping to create a harmonized e-registry of land and attendant disputes, and
3. creating an alternative dispute resolution mechanism for land disputes that integrates traditional and formal dispute resolution practices to provide disputants a remedy that is accessible, fair and just.
To be judged a success, the project must gain acceptance both by the populace and the central government, in accordance with IBO’s broader mission of promoting effective rule of law through ADR.”
It would use basic technology to let citizens document their sides of dispute and present it for ADR process. The tech could provide a structure and design to the ADR, guiding the citizens through it. It could also supply a way to collect, store, and share evidence that will be useful in deciding the outcome of ADR.
There are more slides for the proposed project from a USIP November 2011 presentation.
Of course, there is no online information about how this system could be implemented with citizens and with the approval-stamp of the government. The inklings of the project provide one prototype (or perhaps, concept design) that could move the ODR for ATJ (Online Dispute Resolution for Access to Justice) idea space forward.
Sheldon Himelfarb wrote a summary of different mobile-based design interventions for improving quality of life and rule of law in Afghanistan, including a short summary of the ‘aspirational program’ of the Online Dispute Resolution system.
He wrote, “Currently, the promise of this program seems to be mainly in capturing land data in digital form through the use of smart phones in order to convert handwritten and woefully inadequate land records into reliable digital repositories. The actual arbitration via mobile phone of the project is decidedly more problematic. Although a great deal of preparatory work has been done, considerable cultural challenges remain, given Afghanistan’s traditional justice system. Most of the Afghanistan rule-of-law experts who were consulted expressed great skepticism about the willingness of local communities to abide by decisions rendered by officials, however impartial, who are remote and unfamiliar to them”
This commentary indicates the cultural and political barriers that may arise to prevent an ODR for ATJ system.
http://popplet.com/app/#/535625
This is my law/design class’ brainstorm on problems refugees & the UNHCR face in communication. There are many challenges, especially in opening more reliable, trustworthy, & resonant channels between the UN bureaucracy and the refugees in an unsettled & knowledge-deprived space.
Dispute resolution mechanisms inside refugee communities can be a model for other resolution systems in non-refugee contexts.
For example, consider the ideas identified in this write-up of design interventions in a Serbian camp in the 1990s, by Divna Persic-Todorovic. In particular, consider in-person and game-based trainings in dispute resolution.
“This article is about the work on interpersonal conflict resolution in refugee camps in Serbia by the MOST group for non-violent conflict resolution. Difficult living conditions in refugee camps (lack of facilities; the necessity to share them) created many interpersonal disagreements. The situation was worsened by the sense of hopelessness that people brought from the places which they had to flee. They shared horrible stories of the war and of failed attempts to make their lives better. This circular motion of pain produced more sorrow.
“To break these dynamics, MOST organized activities in summer camps for refugees to teach people problem solving skills and active listening, promoting more understanding between them. They used such techniques as “Communication Games”, the “Secret Friend” game and workshops with an emphasis on conflict analysis. The “Secret Friend” game created an atmosphere of joy. People were coming up with creative ideas for how to make another person happily surprised. In analyzing their relationships, people were exercising active listening techniques and learned to recognize each others’ needs. Going from there, they tried to create solutions. The author concludes that the work done by MOST produced encouraging results in improving refugee’s relations and their view of life.”
Persic-Todorovic, Divna. Conflict Resolution, Working with Refugees. Conflict Resolution Notes. V. 12, No. 4. April, 1995. Pp. 44-45.