The future of the Florida judiciary: Chief Justice Gerald Kogan's Access Initiative.

• Author: Waters, Robert Craig

On June 3, 1996, Gerald Kogan became the first chief justice of Florida to be inaugurated publicly, emphasizing the major policy initiative of his administration--increasing public access to the state's justice system. This "Access Initiative" has seven major goals that will affect every level of the state courts system in the years ahead. And it will prepare for social upheavals already rumbling through these threshold years of the 21st century.

Long-range forecasting shows that the next century will require a judiciary very different from the one that has existed for most of this century. These changes are being wrought by an ever-rising tide of "lawyerless litigation," rapidly changing information technology, and an economic landscape that increasingly makes qualified legal help too expensive for many people. The Access Initiative is the first comprehensive set of reforms by the Florida judiciary designed to address this emerging landscape of the next century.

From the start, the initiative has focused on the Internet's World-Wide Web as a crucial tool for distributing court-related information directly to the public. All seven of the initiative's major goals use the Internet either to create new, or enhance existing, public information and education programs. The initiative demonstrates how a court's presence on the Internet can be an important component of many different judicial programs and services, enhancing public access provided by the overall legal system.

The Florida Supreme Court Home Pages on the Internet (located at http://www.firn.edu/supct) rest on the premise that the Internet is an entirely new medium. Moreover, it is unlike any other medium, because it is capable of sending detailed information quickly and inexpensively into every community served by a court, no matter how remote.

The advent of this medium has radically lowered barriers that previously discouraged courts from engaging in the costly business of distributing the information they produced, forcing them instead to rely on private business to undertake the task. At little cost, the Internet can serve as a conduit delivering court opinions and other documents directly to the public without the costs created by these private middle-men. This in turn increases public access to justice both by making information more readily available and by reducing its cost.

Potent social and economic forces are likely to force the legal community to rely increasingly on this new medium. While the rich can afford expensive legal fees and the poor have public defenders and legal aid, the American middle class believes it is being pushed into an "economic ghetto" that deprives its...