Connecting with the Courts: Online Access to State Judicial Systems

Access to the legal system is critical in any democracy. In this article, we extend past research by exploring a new and twenty-first century dimension of access—namely, access to a state's court system through its judiciary website. Using data from all fifty state judiciary websites, we find that online access is associated with the complexity and efficiency of the court system and, to a lesser extent, state-level Internet penetration and the size of the legal community, while partisan control generally has a modest or null effect. This suggests that practical or administrative considerations are more influential than political considerations when establishing online access to state courts.