Journalists routinely live-tweet high-profile criminal trials, a practice that raises questions about access to justice and the principle of open court. Does social media open up the justice system? There is a normative debate in the literature about the use of Twitter and social media in the courtroom. This paper takes on this debate by exploring the relationship between digital technologies and criminal justice. Through a systematic examination of journalists’ tweets during two key trials (Ghomeshi and Saretzky), we ask to what extent can the live-tweeting of court proceedings achieve greater access to justice in Canada? We argue that while the live-tweeting does provide more access to court, potentially furthering the principle of open court, the nature of this access provides little in the way of increased engagement with the public and its understanding of the legal system. This paper makes contributions to both the legal studies and digital politics literatures.

Lay participation in criminal trials has primarily been studied in common law systems, thereby mainly focusing on the separate role of juries. These studies have provided detailed accounts of language use between jurors during deliberation as well as their use of storytelling techniques and common-sense reasoning in decision-making. However, only few studies have focused on the linguistic learning processes that lay judges in other legal systems go through when they deliberate cases together with a professional judge both in reaching a verdict and in sentencing. In Denmark, lay judges are appointed for a period of four years, and this paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of lay judges and their growing experience with interactions in the deliberation room. It argues that lay judges learn to use legal language in order to strengthen their arguments vis-à-vis the professional judges. Lay judges feel that their influence is dependent on how well they master new, legal context-specific ways of expressing themselves, a point that may run counter to their legitimation as lay voices in an otherwise formalized judiciary.