Conference Agenda

Across the globe, justice systems are struggling to adapt to exploding community legal needs, the growing complexity of modern life and law, and emerging technologies that move light years faster than administrative functions. As just one example, in the United States, courts are facing a rising tide of small-scale but high-stakes cases—including debt collections, evictions, and family law matters—that have come to dominate, and all too often overwhelm, civil court dockets. These cases often share a number of core problems: a lack of meaningful participation by many of the litigants, resolutions that do not faithfully reflects substantive or procedural law, and a lack transparency. New models of justice innovation are necessary—and possible.

This Paper describes an ambitious blueprint for new approaches to the administration of justice. This work stems from a first-of-its-kind partnership between a major court system, the Los Angeles Superior Cout (LASC), the largest trial court in the U.S., and a leading research university, Stanford University. After describing the problems that afflict many high-volume dockets in U.S. courts, it shows how the LASC-Stanford collaboration is trying to solve those problems via a mix of evidence-based design and a remaking of the Court’s digital pathways for serving court users, including the incorporation of artificial intelligence into the Court’s operations in both litigant-facing and internal, court-facing ways. Along the way, the Paper makes three core arguments. First, improving court data infrastructure and data-analytic capacity are foundational to improving court administration. Second, courts should consider be considering ways to adopt a more active and affirmative role to increase access to justice in the segments of the civil justice where the adversarial process has substantially broken down. Third, court-academic partnerships are a key part of justice innovation around the world but particularly in the U.S., where constitutional separation of powers fuels strong norms of judicial independence and related commitments to court neutrality and impartiality that can raise reform barriers.

This article critically examines key challenges within Thailand’s justice system based on institutional performance data and stakeholder perspectives, obtained through in-depth interviews with experts, policymakers, and practitioners. The analysis identifies three core dimensions of concern. First, legal justice remains hindered by procedural complexity, inconsistent legal standards, a state-centric approach to law enforcement, and low public legal literacy. Second, alignment with international standards is impeded by unequal access to justice, excessive reliance on punitive measures, limited institutional capacity to address emerging crimes, and insufficient victim support and offender reintegration. Third, governance and collaboration within the justice system are weakened by low rule of law scores, minimal public participation, poor inter-agency coordination, lack of shared frameworks, and reactive transparency mechanisms. These findings underscore the need for systemic reform to enhance fairness, accessibility, and accountability in Thailand’s justice administration.

The paper aims to analyse a special instrument introduced into the Hungarian judicial system whose declared function is to preserve the unity of case-law, the uniform interpretation of law by courts in the judicial system. The analysis of the rules governing the composition of the Uniformity Complaints Board, as well as the rules governing the complaint itself, in the context of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights on remedies and special instruments for preserving uniformity of interpretation within the judiciary, will show that this solution is an instrument of court packing, which does not comply with the requirement of a court established by law.

The analysis will also try to collect sound possibilities of court administration to help maintain uniform interpretation.