The 21st century has transformed the courtroom: Hearings that once drowned in paper now unfold through digital files, video links, virtual hearings, appellate courts’ YouTube channels, livestreams, e‑filing, digital case management, online bundles, and predictive analytics. Cornelia Vismann once observed that ‘a new way of binding or of writing things down, a change in the way data are collected, affects the legal framework’.^[1] This prompts a sharper question in the 21^st century: how do digitalisation and datafication of the courts impact the legal framework today? 

In a recent article, drawing on media archaeology and the history of legal administration, we approached this question through the historically contested place of cameras in UK courtrooms.^[2] There we argued that cameras in the courtroom sit at the intersection of administrative techniques of control and archive, contemporary visual culture, and shifting class relations. Far from being neutral recording devices, they have repeatedly served as sites where struggles over meaning, authority, and public access to justice are staged. Tracing a century of the camera ban introduced by section 41 of the Criminal Justice Act 1925, we suggested that the re‑entry of cameras in the courts in the 21st century does not mark a straightforward liberalisation of judicial image and meaning making but a renegotiation over what may be seen and circulated as justice in operation, and by whom. Here we sketch three unfolding dimensions of this digital transformation and its impact on the legal framework.

It is always about class 

At the start of the twentieth century the availability of portable cameras coincided with the rise of the penny press catering to the working-class population of UK, which led to a demand for courtroom images to accompany the popular coverage of sensational and scandalous legal trials. In addition to murder trials, matrimonial hearings of ‘celebrities’ of the time were subject to scrutiny of the mass media, disclosing tensions between ‘the people’ and the elite, the media and the judges, and courtroom images and the judicial administration. 

Just as the law was ill at ease with the new technology of photography, the judiciary was uneasy with the working class’s rising interest in the functioning of the courts. Drawing on parliamentary and academic debates from the period preceding the ban, commission reports, and secondary literature including Linda Mulcahy’s valuable work^[3] we argue that the ban reasserted control over the courtroom’s symbolic order at a moment when the working class was gaining unprecedented access to it. The consequent ban was a product of the class tension between the working-class readership of the penny press, or in the words of The Law Journal, those driven by ‘the vulgar curiosity of the multitude’ and the judiciary’s monopoly over what could be seen, said, and circulated about the courts. The attempt to control the images that formed the working‑class imagination of courtroom functioning should be read as an attempt by the judiciary to strictly control how the working class perceived their relation to law, the elites, and legal authority.

The judiciary justified the ban through the doctrine of ‘the dignity of the courts’, which became useful as an ideological defence of the autonomy and authority of the legal form itself. Historically, ‘dignity’ functioned as a marker of class distinction, distinguishing those in high-ranking position aristocracy from the broader populace. However, in the nineteenth century, this aristocratic notion of dignity gave way to a bourgeois interpretation. In this shift, the traditional privileges of bloodlines and royal status were replaced by middle-class values, centring dignity around the protection of private property and commercial enterprise. In Pashukanis’ language, the state here defends the ‘purity’ and authority of the legal form against forms of representation that might reveal its class character or re‑contextualise it within popular visual culture.^[4] Cameras have returned to courts in England and Wales following a slew of new laws starting from 2003, and proceedings at the new Supreme Court have been captured from the start.

However, even as courtrooms across the country get filled with screens and cameras, with livecasted courtroom footage available via YouTube, the production and circulation of courtroom images are strictly limited through contempt of court rules, copyright laws, and broadcast regulations. This restriction is now framed not around protecting the ‘dignity’ of the court, but around preserving the ‘authenticity’ of decision-making; a historical shift in the terminology of law which serve the same aim. Consequently, these images cannot be freely circulated, remixed, or reinterpreted on social media by the masses, nor used beyond the strict intentions of the court. If the public were allowed to freely appropriate these images, the courtroom’s tightly controlled narrative would be subjected to popular debate, cultural critique, and political reinterpretation and even ridicule. Therefore, the court’s hostility to uncontrolled courtroom images can be seen as a hostility to anything that re-embeds legal relations in their messy social context, as this popular recontextualization threatens to shatter the illusion of a ‘pure’ and autonomous legal form.

Images need to be tamed

Law has always had an uneasy relation with images. This unease has been labelled ‘juridical image scepticism’ by Vismann, and it is what Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead call laws iconophobic foundation, a desire to abandon the sensuousness and ambiguity of the image for the cold rationality of the written word.^[5] The 1925 ban on courtroom images was concurrently part of the broader modernisation of the state apparatus in the early twentieth century, a period in which new technologies of recording, reproduction, and circulation utilising cameras, printing presses, carbon copies, typewriters, were transforming every major administrative branch of state. The judiciary’s response to the emerging technology of photography was, in this sense, one instance of a wider renegotiation between state institutions and their attempt to use technology that was simultaneously empowering and threatening their operations. 

The modernising state embraced images only where it could tame and control them. Following Allan Sekula, we argue that images were either converted into ‘administrative images’ or suppressed altogether. The state could only comprehend the image as an instrument, a means for an external aim. Photographs of colonised bodies, aerial surveys of land for planning and warfare, and police mugshots were readily incorporated into diverse branches of state administration. Sekula highlights the ‘univalent’, indexical character of such images – ‘signs that could only carry one meaning, that could point to only one object.’^[6] As a conclusion to this ongoing struggle over what may be seen and circulated, and by whom, courts opted to prohibit images altogether until they could construct an infrastructure capable of producing and exploiting them on their own terms. Today, courtroom videos that reproduce the administrative aesthetics are almost unwatchable: they offer to the viewer a static, bureaucratic aesthetic that looks less like public justice and more like a table in a government office. The studied stiltedness of the footage marks its indexical character, its bureaucratic aesthetic obscures the political dimensions of justice and legal meaning making.

Data, it is all about data

We raise our last point here: Cameras return to the courtroom in the 21^st century not only as devices of visibility that finally have the capacity to produce administrative images, but as data‑capture apparatuses aligned with the wider logic of platform capitalism and algorithmic governance. Under this logic, the camera both offers a surveillant gaze that archives forever, and acts as an interface between abstract measurement and human perception, where quantities and categories and comparison are encoded through time and spatial positions. In our article, we traced the the relation between the ban and the evolution of the concept of ‘open justice’ in UK courts, a concept whose hollowness is almost admirable in its audacity. We argue that through the course of the twentieth century the meaning of ‘open justice’ shifts from the physical act of seeing the proceedings of a trial – a Benthamite mutual audit mechanism premised on co‑presence – to a more expansive logic that underwrites the politico‑aesthetics of the data regime, operating with the presumed presence of an omniscient observer, whether real or imagined. Visibility in the courtroom moves from a managed technique of mutual control to mandatory openness to data capture and archiving, and courtroom images follow the same path: the camera here makes a grand return as an apparatus of continuous visibility and capture. The return is lauded for its contribution to courtroom ‘transparency’^[7] and ‘efficiency’ both of which have emerged as the dominant rhetorical and operational frameworks in contemporary governmentality.

We have long abandoned the comfortable fiction that mass surveillance is something other governments do, the oriental despot conveniently conjured whenever Western politicians require a villain. What has replaced it is something far more insidious: a surveillance apparatus that does not announce itself as such, because it has been seamlessly fused with platform capitalism and algorithmic governance. Where authoritarian states once spoke of security and order, the liberal democratic state speaks of efficiency, transparency, and accountability to justify this emerging architecture of control. The datafication of society which claims to solve almost any administrative problem, has left a lasting imprint on the legal framework. ‘Our findings highlight the profound impact of data-driven approaches [to the justice system] on fostering a more just society and promoting sustainable economic growth’ argue World Bank researchers. While successive governments have justified digital reforms in the justice system primarily in terms of efficiency and cost reduction, these changes are quietly laying the groundwork for something more fundamental: a novel logic of governance organised around algorithmic decision making and automated data processing. Such a transformation requires the datafication of citizens interactions with the state across multiple domains, filling state administration with data points, and the progressive merger of that data across institutional boundaries. The legal framework that accompanies the automated governance will not be found in courts or statutes alone particularly when governance is outsourced. It is being written in regulatory frameworks, compliance infrastructures, data architectures, platform infrastructures, and the expanding zone where corporate interests and state control increasingly converge. 

The working class and marginalised groups bear the heaviest burdens of this transformation. For instance, some of the earliest uses of the new data architecture capture regime has openly targeted the poor. A welfare fraud system called SyRI operated by the Dutch government that combines data from multiple state databases – tax records, employment, housing, benefits – to identify citizens at risk of welfare fraud has been found in breach of the right to privacy under Article 8 of the ECHR.^[8] Similarly in the UK, the Universal Credit system represents the first major government service to go digital, utilising algorithmic decision-making managed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) that has been heavily criticised for algorithm failures and devastating consequences of it on the poor. In the latest notorious example, Palantir that builds advanced data integration and analytics platforms for Pentagon, CIA and Israil’s occupation of Palestine, has been contracted to UK Ministry of Defence, NHS, Metropolitan Police and even the Financial Conduct Authority, with the promise of collecting, integrating, and analysing data of all citizens. Palantir also previously approached the Ministry of Justice for to use AI for calculating prisoners’ reoffending risks.

What began as a ban on the penny press photographer, ends with Palantir at the door of the Ministry of Justice. Across a long century of ‘modernisation’, the central issue has never been technology itself but the question of control: who wields these devices, to what ends; who is permitted to see the operations of power, on whose terms, and in what form. The 1925 ban was one answer to that question; the data architecture of the contemporary digital state is another. When Thatcher insisted there was no alternative to dismantling the welfare state for private profit, it was evident to both those who resisted and those who benefited that this was a political decision, not an economic inevitability. Likewise, the turn to surveillance capitalism and the delegation of state power to private firms to render citizens as data under the banners of ‘efficiency and ‘transparency’ is a political choice.

^[1] Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology (Stanford University Press 2008) xiii.

^[2] Kamiloglu, O. and Sharma, K. (2026), From Prohibition to Digitalisation: 100 Years of Cameras in the Courtroom. Mod Law Rev., 89: 406-438. 

^[3] Linda Mulcahy, ‘Revolting consumers: a revisionist account of the 1925 ban on photography in English and Welsh courts and its implications for debate about who is able to produce, manage and consume images of the trial’ (2018) 14 International Journal of Law in Context 559, 573.

^[4] Evgeny Pashukanis, Selected Writings on Marxism and Law, eds. Piers Beirne and Robert Sharlet (London & New York: Academic Press, 1980) 30. 

^[5] Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead, ‘Introduction’ in Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead (eds), Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1999)

^[6] Allan Sekula, ‘The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War’ (1975) 14 Artforum 26.

^[7] The use of the term has increased dramatically in the last decade in legal judgments and academic works. For a recent review of literature see: Ida Koivisto, The Transparency Paradox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

^[8] NJCM et al. v The Dutch State [2020], The Hague District Court, ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2020:1878.