The Problem, Stated Plainly
I reminisce. There are hearings where the facts stand undisputed, the police step back, and the State chooses silence. The courtroom holds its poise. No theatrics. Law is simply being reasoned into meaning.
Yet, outside that space, snippets of the hearing may be clipped and shared online, out of context and out of proportion. A stray line becomes a slogan. A tense exchange becomes a headline. What stands violated then is not secrecy, but the sanctity of judicial labour: the interior moral space in which adjudication must unfold.
In an era where technology increasingly mediates the path to justice, courtrooms risk becoming theatres of exposure. The question is no longer whether adjudication can be digitised and digitalised, but whether it can be done without losing its soul.
This is not an abstract worry. When justice is consumed before it is delivered, when clips trend long before a reasoned order, perception outruns law. And we as judges through our actions or inactions allow or invite this spectacle, institutions owe the public a plan.
Why “Open” Is Not The Same As “Exposed”
Courts are not Parliament. Legislatures are arenas for political speech; courts decide disputes and speak to bind, not to perform. Transparency is a constitutional virtue, but unstructured digital exposure is exposure without ethics.
An open court welcomes witnesses, not extraction. It allows the public to watch the full process, not to harvest fragments. When digital fragments circulate without care, what erodes is not the law, but our collective trust in how it is made.
Open justice does not mean that every phrase uttered in a hearing is fair game for decontextualised amplification. It means that the process remains visible, intelligible, and accountable. When visibility turns into spectacle, the very idea of an “open court” is quietly emptied of content.
The Fragile Digital Courtroom
Some days, the courtroom still feels like the courtroom of old: calm, focused, tangible. Other days, silent onlookers log in by the hundreds, unknown and unchecked.
Often, there is no specific judicial order allowing this mode of presence, no uniform protocol to regulate recording or reuse. The courtroom's heuristic zone, its protected space for attention and judgment, grows porous.
In such a setting, a single line, cut loose from its legal frame, can become a slogan or a weapon. The court is no longer simply a site of deliberation; it becomes a source of content. The danger is simple: adjudication begins to adjust itself, however subtly, to an invisible, unaccountable audience.
The digital courtroom needs conscious design. Without it, the conditions for fair and fearless judgment steadily thin out.
Gendered Burdens
The harms of this environment are not evenly distributed. Judicial speech already attracts scrutiny. For women judges, that scrutiny is distinctly gendered.
“Too firm” is labelled strident. “Too measured” is read as weak. Strip context and the bias multiplies. When a remark is removed from the full hearing and thrown into a digital crowd, it becomes raw material for commentary that is neither professional nor fair.
Privacy here is not insulation. It is equality's precondition. If some judges must constantly factor in disproportionate, gendered fallout, their independence is not equal to that of their colleagues.
A digital court that ignores these asymmetries does not merely risk individual harm. It risks institutional credibility.
The Ethics Of Judicial Speech In A Viral Age
Platforms reward sharpness over sobriety. They privilege what can be looped, captioned, and shared. In that environment, the pressure to speak for effect is real.
Do we consider how a line, looped and decontextualised, will sound when it appears alone on a screen, without the record, the submissions, or the final order that gave it meaning? Does authority rest in resonance, or in restraint? Should judicial speech be shaped by the logic of virality, or by the discipline of reasons that can withstand scrutiny over time?
On August 2, 2025, Justice Surya Kant's RC Lahoti Memorial Lecture, in the context of digital legal aid, placed this tension squarely in our time: “No technology is neutral. Privacy must be paramount… Justice is still a human act. It is not rendered by bandwidth but by conscience. The greatness of law lies not in authority, but in service; not in rigidity, but in compassion.” [Source: Live Law]
The corollary is institutional; if confidentiality and security are non-negotiable in digital legal aid, the courts themselves cannot ignore them. At an event at the Madras High Court in October 2025, Justice Surya Kant—now the Chief Justice of India—observed judicial infrastructure shapes how justice is perceived and delivered; yes, conscience cannot be left to the algorithms of virality.
If privacy is non-negotiable for the tools around the court, it cannot be optional at the heart of adjudication itself. Should technology dictate how courts speak, or must courts design technology to honour conscience? Justice cannot be surrendered to platform logics of reach and virality. If ethical architecture is needed for peripheral services, shouldn't it begin at the heart of adjudication?
Privacy As Institutional Conscience
Two thinkers help anchor privacy in a constitutional ethic for courts.
Priscilla Regan (Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public Policy 1995) sees privacy not just as a personal right but as a societal value, a public good that enables institutions to retain legitimacy. When people know that walking into a court exposes every gesture to uncontrolled circulation, participation shrinks and trust frays.
Prof. Mette Birkedal Bruun (Director, Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen) conceives privacy as interiority, a space for moral meaning-making. For courts, this means guarding the quiet where conscience works before the law speaks. Live-streaming without design erases that space.
Trading privacy for efficiency or reach erodes trust. In courts, privacy guards context, prevents humiliation, and keeps scrutiny accurate and meaningful. Real transparency rests on complete records, reasoned orders, and certified streams, not on viral fragments.
The courtroom is not a sealed chamber. But it is a bounded zone, a site of cognitive labour. Like a lab or a rehearsal hall, it must remain open to witness, not to distortion. Context is not a luxury. It is the oxygen of fairness.
The upshot is clear: courts are deliberative privacy zones, not sites of secrecy, but constitutional spaces safeguarding impartial adjudication and dignity. The right of access to justice is not a licence to sensationalise judicial speech as consumable media.
Rethinking Virality And Public Access
We often hear that more speech will cure bad speech, that public scrutiny is the bedrock of judicial legitimacy, and that digital virality is the new public gallery. These assertions, while intuitively appealing, overlook a structural truth.
Not all speech travels equally. Not all scrutiny preserves meaning. Platforms are designed to reward what provokes, not what explains. In that environment, the most nuanced speech becomes the most vulnerable. Judicial fragments, when unanchored from their procedural and ethical frames, become tools for outrage or satire.
When a courtroom is reduced to a highlight reel, what is lost is not just decorum. It is the deliberative method that gives judicial speech its legitimacy. Yes, open justice matters. But access is not a licence to distort. Protecting the interior space of adjudication is not censorship; it is calibration. Courts must remain porous to witness yet resistant to manipulation.
That requires civic architecture: delayed streams, certified transcripts, anonymisation protocols, and clear reuse norms that prevent deceptive edits. The goal is not to limit access, but to structure it.
Privacy, in this light, is not about hiding. It is about holding space. It guards against epistemic harm, shields vulnerable participants, and sustains the moral coherence of judicial work. Without it, virality becomes not a mirror of justice, but its funhouse distortion.
The Datafied Courtroom: Where Privacy Must Intervene
Courts now generate and circulate massive data: algorithmic cause-lists, real-time recordings, biometric trails, digital signatures, electronic filings. These data points track presence without context. Users leave trails they cannot easily see, control, or correct.
Privacy must not be a side-note. It must be a core ethic.
Shield: Protect litigants, staff, and lawyers from unnecessary exposure and misuse of data.
Sword: Let court users contest, correct, or withhold data that affects them.
Scaffold: Build systems that embed dignity by design, not as an afterthought.
Without this ethic, the datafied courtroom will reproduce and deepen existing inequalities. With it, courts can model what responsible data governance looks like in a constitutional democracy.
Judicial Agnosticism And The Custodial Demands Of Judicial Data
The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Rules, 2025, officially notified in India to operationalize the DPDP Act, 2023, establishes a consent-first framework for data protection. The DPDP framework although dealing with personal data leaves the judiciary to interpret its obligations within the lived realities of digital procedure.
Courts increasingly determine the purpose and manner of processing personal data—through e-filing systems, virtual hearings, electronic records, and publicly accessible digital outputs. This operational closeness to fiduciary responsibility exposes an unarticulated question of capacity: who within the judicial institution ensures that constitutional commitments to privacy, dignity, and fair process are not eroded by the technological pathways through which justice now travels?
As judicial labour unfolds through electronic records, law must guard against distortion without yielding its conscience to code. The question, ultimately, is constitutional rather than technical: truth in adjudication rests on proof and conscience alike.
The Missing Office: A Privacy Officer For Courts
Norms for video-conferencing and live-streaming already exist, but they are scattered and uneven. The need now is coherence and an institutional home.
Each court may have a Privacy Officer, an institutional custodian ensuring that openness is structured, not improvised.
Such an office would:
Prefer authorised streams with measured delay over uncontrolled live feeds.
Treat certified transcripts, recordings, and reasoned orders as the canonical public record.
Default to anonymisation in sensitive matters.
Forbid unauthorised third-party recordings and specify consequences.
Embed safeguards such as watermarks, logs, and tamper-evident feeds and tamper-evident feeds.
Liaise with intermediaries for timely takedowns.
Maintain a mechanism for grievance and redress.
In essence, the Privacy Officer serves as the court's digital conscience, holding the virtual courtroom steady long enough for justice to be seen without being sensationalised.
The Quiet That Justice Needs
The quiet that justice needs is not silence. When a court preserves its interior space—the quiet where doubt, thought, and conscience work—it reminds us: justice binds not through noise, but through reason.
Author is Judge, Madras High Court.
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