Slaw.ca Article on Trial by Zoom

Last week on the legal website Slaw.ca, University of Ottawa law professor Amy Salyzyn wrote about the impact of virtual or online court hearings.

Well worth a read:

"This column considers what our commitment to open courts should look like in a world where virtual hearings are, if not ubiquitous, quite suddenly much more common. I argue that in addition to providing meaningful public access to virtual hearings, courts must also consider important interests, like privacy, and be alert to the possibility that moving court proceedings online can have unintentional impacts on participant experiences and case outcomes. Virtual hearings bring important benefits, but also bring new risks that are worthy of attention (...)

"I should also make clear that the point of this column is not to critique the patchwork of inventive measures that courts have rapidly adopted to deal with operations in the short-term. It strikes me that, generally, many justice stakeholders have worked very hard and cooperatively to make things quickly work in an extremely challenging situation. My goal here is to raise some issues for consideration in the medium to longer term, if we continue to increasingly adopt virtual formats for court hearings."