I completed my LL.M. thesis on judicial decisions at the University of Toronto in 2019 under the supervision of Dr. Andrew Green. My LL.M. thesis takes a deep dive into Canadian judicial decisions:
It examines the historical and theoretical underpinnings of Canadian decisions and the relationship of decision-writing to decision-making.
It discusses the results of an original empirical study of the evolution of British Columbia trial decisions over the last forty years. That study demonstrates a 3x increase in decision length and delivery time. That study then relies on machine learning models to predict what features (e.g., trial length, subject, judge) are the most significant predictors of decision length and delivery time.
It presents a novel survey of Canadian courts. That survey demonstrates that Canadian courts’ views on transparency, judicial independence, and deliberative secrecy are not homogeneous. In contrast, courts' views on the inappropriateness of anonymously tracking how long judges take to draft decisions appear homogenous: no court is willing to facilitate having judges anonymously track how they spend their time in the judicial-writing process (my motivation for trying to track this variable comes from the lack of Canadian research on this topic, Australian research on this topic, and one of Justice David Brown’s trial decisions—2012 ONSC 7014). It also summarizes courts’ views on the relationship of judicial independence to judicial decisions’ structure and style as well as how courts monitor judicial delay in issuing decisions.
Based on the empirical, historical, and theoretical findings, it argues that aspects of the current process for writing and issuing Canadian judicial decisions likely does not further the goals of access to justice and may even hinder them. To improve access to justice, judicial decisions, and decision-making, it suggest that courts and judiciaries should rely on human-centered design to redesign aspects of decisions (a key redesign would be more standardization). It then provides a design plan for such reforms and briefly examines the ways judicial independence may impact them.
My interest in this research grew out of my experience as a law clerk and public interest litigator.