State Law

On Improving the Connecticut Judicial Branch Website

By Ryan

The State of Connecticut Judicial Branch website is good but it can be better.

Connecticut State Seal

Last week, I wrote about making Connecticut Superior Court decisions freely available online at the judicial branch website. Check out some of the discussion on that post. Making superior court decisions available would be the first improvement that I would make to the site.

Here’s some other ideas as to where the site can be improved:

1. There is a civil housing docket that is not online. A user can find eviction cases but not civil cases that appear on the housing docket. These are primarily back rent cases.

2. Publish court room assignments for cases online. This would ease some of the log jam that occurs in large courts on short calendar. Knowing what courtroom I’m supposed to be in prior to going to court would be nice.

3. Put all civil pleadings online and link to them on the judicial branch website. I’m thinking a more user friendly version of the federal pace system.

4. As Gideon noted, live stream and archive video of Supreme Court oral arguments.

5. Create an RSS feed for important court announcements such as closings. This way attorneys and the public can sign up and receive updates in their inbox or their igoogle page.

From what I’ve seen, Connecticut Judicial Branch website is much better than its peers and does a good job providing attorney’s and the general public with information about Connecticut’s courts.

Expanding and improving the Judicial Branch website well serves the twin goals of providing an open judiciary and access to all of Connecticut’s citizens.

Do you have any ideas how the judicial branch website could be improved?

Please share your comments here.

Full post as published by A Connecticut Law Blog on October 27, 2008 (boomark / email).