- The Family Court of Australia has recently made significant and substantial changes in its approach to judgments publication.
- Family Court (FamC) until recently didn't make 1st instance judgments available.
- Before, FamC published roughly 150-200 judgments per year, chosen by their value to legal precedent, mostly appellate decisions.
- This practice contributed to the reputation of the FamC as a secretive court as 1st instance decisions give a better window into how court really works.
- In 2005, FamC judgments project - they developed policies and standards for judgments, developed a style guide and catchwords.
- From 2007, all judgments would be published unless there is a non-publication order.
- Discuss some of the practical aspects of devising and implementing changes to longstanding practice.
- Development of standard judgements template and style guide.
- Some of the judges weren't happy about this, but over time the change has been accepted.
- Identify some of the ongoing challenges faced by the Court in making its judgments publicly available.
- s 121 of the Family Law Act requires the FamC to anonymise all judgments before publishing them by redacting out names, addresses, workplaces.
- They decided to use pseudonyms for party names, otherwise there'd by too many cases called B and B published in the year.
- This change has improved media coverage of FamC decisions.
- They couldn't ask judges associates to do the anonymisation, so a specialist group (Judgments Publication Office) was created to do this.
- Some personal observations about the challenges and rewards of stepping outside the traditional role of the Law Librarian.
- Working on the judgments project has taken her out of her regular library work, but she finds that her librarian skills have been helpful with this project.
- Challenges:
- Anonymisation for parties with high media profiles.
- Judgments often contain a lot of person information which is irrelevant to the issue, but which can be used for identity theft.
- Whatever role you're in (whether traditional librarian or not) it is vital to have good mentors.
- Q How are the pseudonyms selected?
- Start with same initials, be of similar length, be culturally appropriate, generally be of similar ethnic background.
- The unanonymised version is preserved separately.
- Anonymisation is a very work intensive process.