How can improving the collection, sharing, and analysis of data make the civil justice system more accountable to other government institutions, participants in the justice system, and the public at large? We tackle this question from three angles. First we show how accountability can create opportunities for civil justice reform. Drawing on work in other social spheres on large datasets, we identify three lines of research that court data could inform: the extent that structural racism and other biases shape processes and outcomes; the impact of lack of representation on litigants’ experiences and outcomes; and the antecedents and consequences of court involvement for poor people. A second focus is the obstacles that prevent us from increasing our store of knowledge about civil justice problems. These obstacles include: the lack of good data, legal barriers to obtaining data, and real and perceived institutional risks to sharing data. Finally, we report on our efforts to design and build a civil justice data commons (CJDC) addressing these barriers in order to provide fast and frictionless access for policy research as well as operational insights for courts and civil justice institutions to improve equity and service delivery.

This chapter considers the disadvantages arising from the reduced capacity of the common law to serve as a general regulator of contracts. Four areas of ordinary (non-commercial) contracting activity are examined: consumer debt management, payday lending, student loans and non-disclosure agreements. Judicial engagement with these areas of contract has been minimal or non-existent. The examples show how little influence some common problems in consumer contracting, or other contracts involving inequality of bargaining power, have had on the development of contract law rules. The law’s lack of exposure to some common issues generated by its rules only serves to compound the hold that commercial contracting has over legal development. The dearth of legal engagement with these issues also closes off an important forum for the debate, development and communication of contract’s deeper normative values, including the general standards of conduct that are, or should be, inherent in contracting. This accelerates the process of common law impoverishment.