Judicial Reputation and Social Media

This paper examines how three apex courts in Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Slovakia use social media to communicate with external audiences. Each of the three courts uses social media, but not all utilise these new communication channels to the fullest. As we will see, there are several functional uses of social media. They can be used as a relatively unidirectional announcement channel, indicating to social media users the time and date of a trial, a decision being delivered, or the stage of the process taking place. This use of social media facilitates the primary purpose of judicial dispute resolution. Alternatively, courts can use social media for educational campaigns, for promotion and as a tool to sell other assets of the court, or for signalling support of social causes. Max Weber famously conceptualised three types of legitimate authority that correspond to three types of legitimising claims: tradition, faith, and legal enactment. Courts are a prototypic example of an institution built in the image of the Weberian legal-rational bureaucracy. In a system based on impersonal rules and technology for adopting those rules, judges are but faceless officers of the law; its mouth, so to speak. Contemporary courts, however, have moved away from being just a cog in the machine. They increasingly seek out legitimisation in the public sphere. Many judges nowadays engage the public directly, without intermediation, and do not shy away even from a bidirectional interaction. Judicial bodies around the world increasingly rely on social media to find and amplify their voice, build a reputation, and support their primary function, which is judicial decision-making. These outreach attempts can be understood by unpacking the concept of judicial reputation, which recognises distinct charismatic qualities in the otherwise bureaucratic machinery of justice. After cataloguing the social media communication of the three studied courts, the paper attempts to reconcile the use of social media by courts with the theories of judicial reputation, which have primarily focused on judgment compliance and have assumed noiseless transmission of information between a court and its audience.