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Abstract

COVID-19 had an instant effect on the court system in the United States as court business ground to a halt and then transitioned to being conducted online. Now the courts have a substantial decision to make concerning how much court business should continue being conducted online and what court business should return entirely to in-person proceedings. Because of the relative recency of digital court modalities, the body of existent research is small. Moreover, the existing universe of law research takes pre-pandemic in-person proceedings as a necessary baseline instead of considering virtual courts as a potential mechanism for improving enduring problems in the in-person court system. Methodologically, much law research in this space focuses exclusively on surveying legal practitioners. We depart from this work by surveying ordinary people-the same people who are affected by the decisions of courts to conduct their business virtually or in-person. Therefore, we contribute the perspective of the end users of digital courts. We focus on the state of Illinois, fielding a digital survey to ask Illinois residents about their perceptions and preferences about virtual versus in- person courts. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, we present findings related to specific substantive use-cases for virtual courts and a variety of arguments for and against virtual courts. We find that ordinary people have nuanced concerns about court modality, weighing factors like security, accessibility, and complexity into their preferences. We conclude the Article by considering how virtual courts might solve some problems of in-person courts before the pandemic, and how new concerns with virtual courts might be ameliorated or systematically researched.

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