I’ve been thinking about mobile justice for about a year now.

The notion, as I have come to understand it, is as follows: as in the examples of mobile health or mobile banking, perhaps mobile technologies could be harnessed to increase citizen access to justice and to improve the public administration of justice. It’s a topic that is both old (legal informatics practitioners have been using electronic case databases for years now, in many places) and new (virtual courts in Kenya use video teleconference technology to pipe in a judge, live and direct, to your locality). I can point to examples that use satellite video link, radio, SMS forms, and live web-streaming. I can come up with cases in India, Cambodia, the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the United States. Taking into consideration the differences in objectives, geography, technology, and scope, these examples seem to form an emerging field of practice.