Making EU Justice Smart? Looking into the Implementation of New Technologies to Improve the Efficency of Cross Border Justice Services Delivery

Recently, there is a growing attention on the topic of "smart technologies". Many scholars and specialized journals pay attention to the development of smart tools and to their characteristics of "smartness". Despite scholars talk of smart technology in many fields from e-government to health-care, there is a very scarce focus on technologies developed in order to digitalize justice procedures (e-justice). This chapter focuses on the topic of e-justice through the lenses of the smart technology literature in order to understand which are the main elements of smartness in the e-justice context and how a service can support them. In order to pursue this objective, the study first analysed the smart technology literature in order to acknowledge which are the main features of a smart technology. This allowed to design a "smart technology framework" that has been applied to the analysis of two e-justice services developed in Europe, the European e-Justice Portal and e-CODEX. By checking which features of smartness the two services are endowed with, we shed light on the peculiarities of e-justice and on which are the main issues that may impede these systems from being smart. In particular, the study acknowledges that when digitalizing justice procedures often the technology reproduces the same issues affecting the legal procedure itself. Even if both cases analyzed demonstrate to be "smart" in terms of multidimensionality, interoperability, adaptability and effectiveness, they are affected by issues related to diffusion and equal accessibility mainly due to the legal procedure that the two services digitalize.