Virtual courts and online procedure: contingency solution to pandemics or necessary evolution

Abstract

The evolution in information technologies has made possible that traditionally face-to-face or group work, to be developed and promoted remotely. In the field of justice, however, the use of these technologies has been scarce. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities that technology can offer in the performance of jurisdictional activity through the creation of virtual courts through an online procedure in which the citizens can obtain a resolution quickly and without intermediaries. Likewise, taking distributed platforms as an example, virtual courts can change the paradigm of justice by creating an authentic court of instance at the state level, in which procedures are processed by an artificial intelligence that builds the procedure, debug and collect the information, and offer the judge (chosen at random or through a competitive system) a virtual file that uses all the advantages of digitization. The virtual courts are not only the solution to the paralysis of justice in a case of confinement, but also the most useful tool to scale a judicial system that can respond to specific increases in the volume of litigation.