The Glass Gavel: A Comparative Study Of Data Privacy Laws And The Doctrine Of Practical Obscurity In The Global Evolution Of Electronic Courts
- IJLLR Journal
- Jul 5
- 1 min read
Ms. Kshama Pandey, PhD Scholar, Presidency University, Bangalore
Prof. Dr. Saroj Sharma, Dean, School of Law, Presidency University, Bangalore
ABSTRACT
Administration of justice has been catalysed by a profound paradigm shift due to rapid transition from traditional physical courtrooms to digitized electronic courts. This transition to electronic court, not to mention virtual hearing as well has compelled to revisit few fundamental principles of law such as Open Court, Open Justice, Right to Privacy, Right to be Forgotten, Right to Erasure among others. This paper attempts to critically examine the Privacy-Transparency Dialectic emerged due to inherent tension between the mandate for judicial transparency and the right to data privacy in the digital age. The paper investigates how the Doctrine of Practical Obscurity has been dramatically eroded making digital judicial record permanent, searchable, and indexable facilitating digital stigmatization and predatory data scraping. The paper evaluates the normative legal frameworks of developed, emerging and poor jurisdictions with a particular focus on European Union General Data Protection Regulation and Indian Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 employing comparative legal methodology.
The core argument of the paper emphasises to integrate Privacy-by-Design (PbD) including pseudonymization-by-default and de-indexing protocols so that the digitization of the judiciary, particularly judicial records shall remain a public service instead of transforming into a tool for private surveillance. The paper advocates for legislative and technical reforms for bifurcating data into public accountability data and sensitive personal data and concludes by proposing a Symmetric Transparency Model that may upholds the constitutional promise of transparency without compromising the fundamental human dignity.
