Introduction
Recent polling points to a lack of faith in judicial institutions across broad swaths of the US population. A 2022 Gallup poll found that overall trust in the judicial branch, for example, fell by more than 20 percentage points in just two years’ time (Jones Reference Jones2022). Paired with a decline in trust in policing and law enforcement institutions in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the resulting racial justice protests (Jones Reference Jones2021), this lack of faith in the utility or trustworthiness of legal structures seems to be in line with similar trends of democratic backsliding discussed by political scientists in the wake of the 2016 election (Grumbach Reference Grumbach2022). These trends of decreased faith in traditional legal and political structures seem likely to contribute to decreased levels of activism or involvement. However, while dissatisfaction in traditional means of political action seems on the rise, recent decades have simultaneously seen an increase in participation in the decentralized and grassroots method of legal activism known as “court watching.”
Since at least the late twentieth century, groups of volunteers have organized to observe court proceedings, and, in recent decades, the scale and number of these groups has increased. The highly dynamic nature of court-watching groups and their decentralized format have left this particular form of legal activism relatively understudied in socio-legal studies and judicial politics. Especially as technological advancements have improved methods of communication and participation, activist groups and others interested in increasing government accountability have leveraged the relative accessibility and ease of “court watching” to broaden participation in the legal system and advance changes or reforms.Footnote 1
Regardless of the general faith in the institutions and actions of government actors at any given time, the courtroom is one of the most common sites at which individuals experience the power of the state. In court, Candace McCoy and Galma Jahic (Reference McCoy and Jahic2013, 61) argue that “the citizen and the government are at their closest, directly interacting, with judges making decisions of direct personal significance to the citizen.” For this reason, the power of court watch groups to change the dynamic of that space can greatly shift the experience of government or state power in individuals’ lives. According to scholars of legal mobilization, the experience and awareness that court watching engenders may also play a role in the political activation of otherwise politically indifferent individuals via their involvement in the legal system (Zemans Reference Zemans1983; Hartmus, Cauthen, and Levine Reference Hartmus, Cauthen and Levine2006). Despite this power, however, the nature of these groups as decentralized and hugely diverse in their missions and methods makes them difficult to study in a comprehensive way.
This article provides a starting point for analyzing court watching as a meaningful site of legal and political mobilization as well as civic engagement in democratic processes in two central ways. First, we establish a four-part definition of court watching, making the case that, in order to serve as the accessible mode of civic engagement and legal accountability that we associate with the court-watch tradition, groups must: (1) recruit volunteers who do not necessarily have legal expertise (and are not required to); (2) provide some form of training to prime observers before entering court; (3) collect data that traces the work of the court; and (4) observe court proceedings in real time (not recordings). Second, we provide what is to the authors’ knowledge the first accounting of every court-watch program in the United States as of the spring of 2024.Footnote 2 By leveraging our original database, we provide preliminary evidence supporting the fact that, despite declining faith in legal and political institutions, individual activists and community members are seeking out this form of legal activism as a method of local participation and mobilization.
Taking seriously the idea inherited from critical legal studies that law is constantly mediated through systems of inequality like class, race, and gender (Unger Reference Unger1983; Tushnet Reference Tushnet1991), we assert that court watching could play a vital role in both addressing imbalances of power in the courtroom setting and increasing general legal consciousness among populations otherwise isolated from legal settings. As we discuss more in the following sections, court watchers often provide crucial bystander effects and other forms of accountability for legal actors that may otherwise operate in settings of unchecked power. Our work thus builds on existing literature that points to the importance of accountability and transparency in effective judicial proceedings—a fact that has been proven across time periods, geographic areas, and academic disciplines (Voermans Reference Voermans2007; Costa Reference Costa2020). Court watching, especially in its contemporary incarnation and expanded through technologies and grassroots networks, thus can and should be looked to as a democratizing force in US legal culture in this era of otherwise waning faith in political institutions.
Existing literature
The preliminary analysis below connects court watching to two central areas of legal studies and social science research that are well established: (1) methods of establishing accountability in the criminal legal context and (2) legal mobilization and activism in the US tradition. This discussion of the connections between court watching and existing academic work should motivate future research into this method of legal activism and its potential for increasing civic engagement among diverse groups of activists.
Accountability in the criminal legal system
Plenty of legal doctrine, especially in the criminal law tradition, has established the need for accountability within the judicial system. Legal actors like judges and prosecutors hold an immense amount of power in the courtroom, with the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence at their disposal (Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Wright Mills2009). In a pithy summation of the centuries-old debate surrounding judicial accountability, former Supreme Court Justice Warren Earl Burger (Reference Burger1964) famously asked “who will watch the watchmen” during a 1964 speech centered on the Suppression Doctrine. But the means available to those seeking to “watch the watchmen” have historically been largely inaccessible to those outside of legal elites, when available at all (Simonson Reference Simonson2016, Reference Simonson2019).
The tradition of procedural justice in US criminal and civil liberties law is centrally motivated by the theoretical desire to install checks on the state in the process of criminal accusation and prosecution. Especially with the era of incorporation beginning with the Warren court in the United States, legal accountability through instruments like guaranteed representation,Footnote 3 Miranda rights,Footnote 4 and minimum expectations for effective counselFootnote 5 have all emerged from some form of the idea that, while the criminal legal system is meant to ensure law and order, it cannot operate without the existence of “watchmen” in the form of procedural hurdles between state power and those accused. Recent work by socio-legal scholars highlights how these protections have become only more crucial and tenuous as the United States has ushered in an era of increased surveillance (Balkin Reference Balkin2008; McCoy Reference McCoy2009; Harris Reference Harris2010). Especially in the context of welfare and protective services, the existence of procedural roadblocks that limit the state’s ability to run roughshod over individual liberties and rights are just as, if not more, important to the US legal system as they were at their establishment (Noonan, Sabel, and Simon Reference Noonan, Sabel and Simon2009; Dettlaff and Boyd Reference Dettlaff and Boyd2020; Koningisor Reference Koningisor2022).
Despite the fact that these procedural hurdles exist in the form of guaranteed civil liberties and protections, many criminal defendants and other participants in the legal system are unfamiliar with what those guarantees actually look like in practice (Brown Reference Brown1996; Denvir, Balmer, and Pleasence Reference Denvir, Balmer and Pleasence2013). For this reason, the specialized knowledge of elite legal actors (lawyers, judges) and the accompanying cordoning off of legal knowledge from everyday American life makes for a tenuous setting in which those procedural protections operate.Footnote 6 As most any public defender would report, many judges and prosecutors in busy courtrooms across the United States view these protections as aspirational goals rather than hard and fast rules (Van Cleave Reference Van Cleve2016; Woog and Fennell Reference Woog and Fennell2021). This reality limits the kind of applied or material accountability that these traditions of procedural justice ensure in criminal legal processes. But, when considered outside the bounds of procedural justice or constitutional standards, systems of judicial accountability have been developed using more practical or quantifiable methods (Espeland and Vannebo Reference Espeland and Vannebo2007).
The moment of sentencing is perhaps the most obvious point at which the power of the criminal legal apparatus bears down on an individual. A singular judge’s power during the sentencing process illustrates the vast discretion that legal elites, in the form of judges, have in punishment (Reitz Reference Reitz1998). During sentencing, de jure legal guardrails for the judge are almost always present in the form of sentencing guidelines, at least in the contemporary history of the United States (Gertner Reference Gertner2010). On the federal level, the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 codified the government’s long-debated position that leaving judges with “extremely broad discretion to select among the purposes of punishment” is too risky of a prospect for a fair criminal legal apparatus (Ogletree Reference Ogletree1988, 1943).Footnote 7 Of course, state-level sentencing guidelines meant to limit judges’ discretion existed long before the law, but growing attention on disparate legal outcomes among American racial and class groups in the mid-century, in conjunction with a general popularity of “tough-on-crime” political campaigns, justified the new law and its accompanying Sentencing Commission. This new body lent credence to the idea that guidelines are an extension of procedural standards that contribute to overall accountability and fairness in the system.Footnote 8
In 1978, the US Justice Department, via a report developed by the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (1978), endorsed sentencing guidelines as a means for “structuring” judicial discretion rather than eliminating it. Considering this institutional buy-in across the US legal landscape, sentencing guidelines and related “rules” for judges are some of the most visible and traditional means by which to install a layer of accountability and transparency in criminal legal proceedings. However, the debate over whether or not sentencing guidelines have been effective in limiting discretion and increasing overall fairness or transparency continues (Albonetti Reference Albonetti1997; Anderson, Kling, and Stith Reference Anderson, Kling and Stith1999; Hofer, Blackwell, and Ruback Reference Hofer, Blackwell and Barry Ruback1999; Frase Reference Frase2019). And, while the Sentencing Reform Act addressed discretion and sentencing rules for judges, sentencing guidelines for prosecutors, as developed through federal and state legislative bodies, are constantly in flux and, thus, difficult to analyze as a true guardrail or source of accountability in the criminal legal process. Going further, these rules often become a political messaging tool for legal elites pursuing politically “tough-on-crime” agendas and have been correlated with an increase in plea bargains by defendants across jurisdictions (Rakoff Reference Rakoff2016).
Researchers have also applied concepts inherited from human resources and benchmarking in the private sector in order to develop “judicial performance evaluation” measures that aim to assess judicial independence and other standards of legal accountability (Brody Reference Brody2003; Paynter and Kearney Reference Paynter and Kearney2010). These measures, while effective as performance evaluations of judges, usually circulate among a limited group of legal elites and are not necessarily guaranteed to be performed across geographies and jurisdictions. Along with the sometimes aspirational guarantees of procedural due process and civil liberties case law, this method for accountability has limits, leaving room for other methods of legal accountability to fill the gap (Espeland and Vannebo Reference Espeland and Vannebo2007). Court watching or citizen accountability programs thus represent a more “bottom-up” approach to accountability—one that relies less on federal legislation or state statute and more on the willingness of outsiders to enter the legal space and provide direct, physical, accountability to actors in the courtroom.
Court watching as legal activism
This bottom-up approach to installing accountability into the criminal legal process is the aspect of court watching that we argue is of most interest to researchers studying criminal justice, civic engagement, and legal mobilization. We assert that this kind of judicial activism taps into a long tradition of citizen oversight that plays a substantial role in shaping US legal culture. Just as procedural protections and sentencing guidelines have been used for decades, even centuries, in the US context, citizen accountability or observer programs are nothing new. The development of court-watching programs in the modern era often emerged out of very specific interest groups or activist movements. But the practice was widespread enough that, likely through policy diffusion, the groups proliferated beyond their individual movement aims and were taken up by factions across ideological and political spectra. For example, by 1975, four general categories of court-watching programs had emerged: “defendant protector projects,” “law and order” groups, “specific data projects,” and “concerned citizen projects,” as defined by the US Justice Department (quoted in Stecich Reference Stecich1975, 468). Unsurprisingly, this wide range of missions bred a multitude of strategies and methods for entering and tracking the happenings in courts. It is illustrative, however, to examine two particular movements that incorporated court watching into their legal activism as a window into the wide applicability of court watching across time periods and political movements.
Groups engaged in the fight against domestic violence and sexual assault have long pointed to court attendance as a method for increasing legal accountability and system efficacy.Footnote 9 One New York nonprofit wrote in 2005 that there is a particular value added in court watching for groups seeking to make an impact in reducing violence against women. That value emerges from the historical experience of domestic violence victims receiving little to no assistance in the criminal legal space after episodes of violence (Goodmark Reference Goodmark2011). The group thus promotes court watching as one part of a broad slate of domestic violence-related reforms in an effort to address this long history of insufficient legal protections:
The pervasiveness of violence against women and the failure of the judicial system to respond may leave victims believing that the legal system does not want to and cannot protect them adequately. Court watching is a clear demonstration to law enforcement and the judiciary that the community is concerned about these crimes and committed to addressing them seriously. Court watching is a positive way for concerned groups and individuals to address problems of bias within the system by documenting when these myths and stereotypes are carried into the courtroom and how they undermine justice for victims. (Legal Momentum: Advancing Women’s Rights 2005; emphasis added)
The report goes on to provide practical advice on how to begin and administer a court watching system focused on issues related to domestic violence and violence against women. Beyond the broad goal of “oversight” or “transparency,” the work of domestic violence activists to make court systems more responsive in these cases illustrates the appeal of court watching as a tactic for broader political and social movements. As jurisdictions have developed diversionary courts or systems dedicated to domestic or family violence in recent years, many court-watching groups make these sites their focus. These family and domestic violence court systems, which often operate outside of, and parallel with, the more traditional criminal legal court system, are of course not immune to the kinds of corruption or bias that characterizes much of the US criminal legal system. As Carole Bell Ford (Reference Ford2005) found in Houston’s courts in the early 1980s and 1990s, court-watching groups spearheaded by anti-domestic violence activists became a real impetus for structural reform.Footnote 10 Beginning with typical court-watching activities, these activists eventually became a full-fledged political action committee, successfully running candidates and exposing the bias and corruption of family court judges (Ford Reference Ford2005). The connection here between court watching and generalized legal activism is clear; drawing on populations who are directly and indirectly affected by issues of domestic and gender violence, court-watching groups put this grassroots method of legal accountability to work. This intersection of political activism and systems of legal accountability illustrate the crucial role that court watching has and continues to play in movements across time and place.
Contemporary activist groups seeking racial justice through legal reforms are perhaps the most visible subset of court watchers, especially since the emergence of the highly visible Black Lives Matter movement in 2014.Footnote 11 Racial justice and other political activist groups often provide opportunities for new volunteers to participate through court watching in an effort to sustain political momentum beyond marches and protests. This particular activity is accessible to those with little experience in the legal system and provides a means of enacting some change, however small, to the system. Again, during an era in which lack of faith in institutions has spurred reformist, radical, and abolitionist movements to swell, court watching and the process of oversight and data collection that it entails provides a tangible means for enacting positive change and channeling frustration over existing systems into productive work. The experience of one new court watcher in Maryland, who was inspired to join her local group after watching the trial and acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse in 2021, is perhaps the best crystallization of the role that court watching can play within movements to connect a lack of judicial transparency to broader movements for racial justice and equity: “If a high-profile case could play out this way,” she told NBC News, “then what are judges doing when no one is watching?” (quoted in Ali Reference Ali2021). While high-profile killings of young Black Americans helped to galvanize broad-based movements on behalf of criminal legal reform and police oversight, many national and local groups used court watching as a means by which to draw legal outsiders into the movement. Anecdotal and narrative evidence suggests that these experiences often led to increased awareness of crises in local justice systems.Footnote 12
As we have established, court watching itself is nothing new among movements in US legal politics. But these contemporary developments in movements, especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter, has likely contributed to growing prevalence of court watching among “outsiders”—those with little personal exposure to the legal system but who nevertheless have become activated to affect change.Footnote 13 While this phenomenon has at this point been identified by journalists through anecdotal or observational evidence, the authors hope that this research can contribute to a more systematized study of the role that court watching might play in deepening activist movements and their capacity for lasting change in the criminal legal system.Footnote 14
What Court Watch New Orleans Louisiana (Court Watch NOLA) founder and lawyer Simone Levine (Reference Levine2020, 1) calls “system outsiders” are crucial for the operation of court-watching groups: those with little to no knowledge or involvement in the legal system provide a form of oversight that is not guaranteed in constitutional law precedents or state statutes. And, just as important, those who do not (yet) view themselves as activists or movement participants are likely to see court watching as a low-stakes and largely accessible form of getting involved—an on-ramp that can bolster participation in these broader movements for years to come (Levine Reference Levine2020). Since the act of court watching requires only one’s presence in the courtroom (as opposed to, say, marching in a protest or physically blocking arrests), it can be a crucial tool for these growing movements for systemic change by establishing a first step for bringing in those outsiders. Thus, the context of contemporary racial justice movements is like that of movements against domestic violence in that both have taken up court watching as one tenet in a much broader landscape of activism. In both contexts, the accessibility of court watching is key in terms of broadening the appeal of these movements to “legal outsiders” who are often new to fights for social, legal, or cultural change.
What is court watching? Establishing a definition
Despite the contemporary flourishing of these court-watching groups, there is little scholarly literature on the role that court watching does, or could potentially play, in the broader picture of American legal culture and democratic politics.Footnote 15 Our intervention aims to address this gap by establishing a working definition of court watching that can be adapted by future researchers. As early as 1970s, researchers acknowledged that these court-watching or accountability groups run the gamut in terms of their mission, approach, and activist aims across the context of US jurisdictions. This diversity necessitates a working definition that is broad enough to encompass that diversity but refined enough to establish a universe of relevant, active, and robust groups that make up the contemporary landscape of court watching.
When developing our database of contemporary court-watching programs, we developed a four-part definition in order to limit the universe of observations and narrow the scope of our analysis as well as to focus on those groups whose central aim is to provide accountability in the legal system, no matter the jurisdiction. While the court-watching groups included in the database are widely diverse in terms of mission, funding structure, political position, and size, they share these four central tenets and thus contribute to the broader culture of accountability and transparency that we argue court watching engenders in the context of US legal mobilization. Each group included in our database exhibits the following characteristics.
Volunteer powered
To be included in the below dataset, a US court-watching or legal accountability group must rely on and recruit volunteer court watchers. Those volunteers might receive course credit, service hours, or other remuneration but they should not be classified as employees of the organization.Footnote 16 This volunteer stipulation is central to our preliminary theory about the accessibility of court watching to the broadest possible pool of actors. As discussed above, we conceive of court watching as a form of accountability that, more so than traditional means of legal oversight like sentencing guidelines or constitutional protection, emerges “from below.”Footnote 17 The practice, by virtue of requiring only someone’s presence in the courtroom, provides a chance for those with no legal training or specialized knowledge to participate in the machinations of legal spaces. For this reason, volunteers, rather than paid employees, exemplify the kind of radical accessibility that we assert characterizes court watching. As noted by McCoy and Jahic (Reference McCoy and Jahic2013, 61), court watchers occupy a distinct but similar role to jurors in the courtroom: “[T]hey are non professional members of the public with no personal economic or reputational stake in litigation.”Footnote 18 Their voluntary capacity cements that status as a court actor without an active stake in the outcome of any one proceeding.
This tenet of our definition limits the universe of observations in another important way: by tracking those groups that need not emerge from a formal legal entity. As will be revealed in our analysis, most of these groups operate in conjunction with law schools, undergraduate institutions, and community groups that likely host court watching as just one aspect of a broader agenda. However, while these partnerships have become central to the effectiveness of court watching in general, they are peripheral to the work of the volunteers, who often learn about the opportunities through those groups but, nevertheless, see court watching as being outside of their formal employment or educational roles. The role of the volunteer in the courtroom thus contributes to the narrative that court watchers, as outsiders, do not represent any one side in the legal process. In the courtroom space, which is, by nature, adversarial, this un-attached or un-affiliated reputation of court-watching volunteers ensures that legal elites like judges or lawyers do not dismiss offhand watchers as institutional actors on behalf of any one interest in the legal process. For these reasons, for a contemporary court-watching group to be included in our database, it must rely on the participation of volunteers.Footnote 19
This aspect of the four-part definition accounts for certain exclusions from our dataset. The Alliance against Intoxicated Motorists (AAIM), for example, which is one of the most visible and long-running programs, has an active court-monitoring program where staff members observe impaired and reckless driving proceedings, with a focus on increasing accountability and illustrating public concern for these cases. However, this group does not fit our traditional definition of court watching as both the training and observation hours are paid. Similarly, a Court Observation Project was conducted in the Alabama Municipal Courts where observations were completed by the Civil Rights Enforcement Unit of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Alabama to identify and inform justices of any unconstitutional practices. However, like AAIM’s court monitoring, this project also failed to use community volunteers. Although the methods and results are similar to that of other court-watching groups, the wage or salary arrangement of these groups justify their exclusion from our universe. Our project attempts to evaluate non-legal actors contributing to the legal system through court watching, and, thus, we specifically examined volunteer-based programs for this project.
Training provision
The stipulation that groups must rely on volunteer court watchers informs the second tenet of our four-part definition. When a court-watching group relies on volunteers, the assumption among the existing legal actors and the community becomes that many or most of those participants have very little legal training in the formal sense. In building our universe of observations, we considered only those groups that, in addition to engaging volunteer court watchers, provided some form of training (however brief) to their participants before sending them into courtrooms to monitor and observe. By providing this training themselves, court-watching groups play a role in equalizing the levels of situational knowledge among individual volunteers. Whether it happens in person or virtually, training sessions provided by court-watching groups also give insight into what to expect once volunteers enter the space.
Additionally, these training sessions allow groups to provide contextual or “insider” knowledge tailored to a specific geographic region or legal jurisdiction.Footnote 20 This insight, no matter how basic the training itself, can make a court watcher’s data collection or accountability measures more effective in practice. Considering this fact, our universe includes groups that provide any type of training, ranging from basic training to contextualize the legal process in general to more intensive training on the history and inner workings of a jurisdiction. For our purposes, the quality or length of the training provided does not determine inclusion in the universe of observations. Rather, whether the training exists at all is what we track in developing this definition. Vignettes of individual court-watching groups provided below illustrate the variety of training, in terms of detail and specialization, across our dataset.
Data collection
For a group to be considered a “court-watching” entity according to our research process, the third tenet of our four-part definition specifies that it must collect data as part of its overall mission. This aspect of court watching instills in volunteers a responsibility, in the form of tracking the actions taking place in a courtroom, to “watch the watchmen.” In many cases, especially in overburdened criminal district or municipal courts that face long dockets and overwhelmed judges and lawyers, a court-watching group might be the only entity tracking overall statistics. Observations like the number of plea deals taken, the number of cases continued onto the next day’s docket, or the average amounts of bail, are usually lost to the everyday machinations of the courtroom, as lawyers focus on individual clients and judges have wide discretion in how they move through their assigned cases. The sort of bird’s eye view that a court watcher embodies, as a non-specialist and someone not attached to any one side in the adversarial legal process, is thus crucial in their capacity to track broader trends in a city or municipality’s criminal legal apparatus.
For inclusion in the dataset, groups must perform (and therefore train their volunteers to perform) some form of data collection, but that data need not be shared publicly. As discussed in more detail below, many court-watching groups present public-facing reports to broad audiences, legal actors, or potential funders as part of their overall mission.Footnote 21 These reports then become a crucial tool for increasing public knowledge about the inner workings of legal systems. These fact-based reports, supported by consistent data collection, can become especially important in political contexts where crime or crime rates are wielded by political and cultural elites. However, for inclusion in our set, a group need not share the results of the data collection process publicly. Some groups, whose mission might be more connected to a particular legal or political outcome rather than broader accountability and transparency, may retain any data collected within the organization, to use only internally. These groups too are included in our dataset.
As discussed above, the oversight of judges, prosecutors, and other state actors in the legal context is rare outside of the context of sentencing guidelines or difficult-to-implement ethics guidelines. Especially in states that have a history of corruption, racial violence, and discrimination, or other forms of legalized inequalities, the act of tracking the happenings inside the courtroom serves as a rare form of oversight over which legal elites have no, or very little, control. This oversight, which happens by virtue of routine and careful data collection, is sometimes met with resistance by judges who are accustomed to only having defendants and associated legal actors in the room as they work.Footnote 22 However, the popular desire for more oversight in the criminal legal system often endears the position of court watchers to the public in general, as they do not represent any one side in the legal system and instead work toward generalized transparency—a goal that largely transgresses partisan and ideological distinctions.
While reporters or journalists might seek out coverage of high-interest cases or individual judges through tools like requests under the Freedom of Information Act or in-depth reporting, court watchers instead trace the less-publicized machinations of court rooms through their process of routine data collection.Footnote 23 This coverage of broader trends and the more mundane aspects of legal life, especially in the criminal legal context, we argue, is a crucial but often missing aspect of conversations concerning the criminal legal system in the era of mass incarceration. While stories following things like wrongful incarcerations, life sentences, violent crimes, and overzealous judges often draw large audiences, the more mundane or everyday aspects of the criminal legal apparatus are less likely to make headlines. Nevertheless, these everyday scenes make up a huge portion of the state’s punishment apparatus. For this reason, court watchers who trace the broader trends of individual courtrooms and dockets play a crucial role not just in providing an extra layer of accountability but also in tracing the contours of how a city’s criminal legal apparatus is operating day by day.
Real-time observations in person
Finally, each group analyzed here performs observations of real-time court proceedings. The court-watching groups included trained volunteers to watch courts work through dockets in real time rather than comb through archived legal documentation or court reports. Similarly, we do not include groups that rely only on recordings of court proceedings. The ability of observers to trace the happenings of court through previously recorded Zoom or other video recordings only really emerged in earnest during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.Footnote 24 As Judith Townend and Lucy Welsh (2023) have argued, the process of opening court processes up to virtual and digital spaces has increased, for the most part, access and accountability on a broad scale, but central to our analysis of contemporary court watching is the embodied act of observing proceedings real time, even if some aspect of the work happens virtually. As Nick Gill and Jo Hynes (Reference Gill and Hynes2020, 569) argue, “the intimacy of court watching in the flesh—hearing the same sounds, experiencing the same atmospheres, feeling the same heat and cold as litigants—can equip courtwatchers with a heightened empathy with experiences of state power. Intimate and embodied approaches to courtwatching help to reclaim and hold accountable the corporeal power that courts claim.” Here we draw on the work of critical and legal geographers who analyze the space of a courtroom as a site of the ultimate state power (Zemans Reference Zemans1991; Levenson Reference Levenson2008; Givoni Reference Givoni2013; Hynes, Gill, and Tomlinson Reference Hynes, Gill and Tomlinson2020).
While many court-watching groups have shifted to observation over Zoom in recent years, our working definition of court watching here requires that a group must, as part of its mission, attend court proceedings as they are happening in person. We include groups that provide coverage of online proceedings, but we require, as the fourth tenet of our four-part definition, that the group also relies at least in part on in-person real-time observations. It is not uncommon for advocacy groups to use publicly available court data rather than live observations. For example, the Wisconsin Civil Justice Council Appellate Program aims to “promote fairness and equity in Wisconsin’s civil justice system” by monitoring court cases and publishing amicus curiae briefs “as needed,” but their lack of real-time observations renders them ineligible for inclusion in our database (Wisconsin Civil Justice Council, n.d.). Strategies and groups like this, despite not meeting our working definition of court watching, still represent an important piece in the landscape of “bottom-up” methods of court accountability and reform.
The reasoning for this fourth aspect of our working definition derives from the difficult-to-quantify bystander effect that court watching has been known to generate since its origins.Footnote 25 Judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and other legal actors, especially when they are accustomed to relatively empty courtrooms, register the presence of an observer. It is of course nearly impossible, without deep research into the experience and perspectives of actors like judges and lawyers, to make any conclusions about the impact that this presence might have in terms of behavior by those actors. However, by requiring via our four-part working definition that these groups generate in-person and real-time observations, we hope to capture the existence of those groups who are most likely to generate a bystander effect in these legal spaces within our universe of observations.Footnote 26
This four-part definition establishes the universe of observations that we provide below and aims to maximize the breadth of court-watching groups while highlighting those groups that are most likely to serve as a nonpartisan and grassroots form of accountability and transparency. A long-standing court-watching group that emerged from activism among crime victims in Anchorage, Alaska, provides one of the simplest and clearest outlines of this definition in a 2000 report: “CourtWatchers are concerned citizens who want to make a positive contribution to the community and who hope to make a positive change in the system” (Alaska Judicial Council 2000, 1). These participants may be described by their respective groups as court watchers, court monitors, or court observers, but they all have the same purpose: to sit in court proceedings and collect data and perhaps create a bystander effect in the process. By involving these “outsiders” in the specialized world of legal proceedings, court watching, by our definition, trains, educates, and mobilizes a fruitful form of legal oversight. We propose that groups operating under these four stipulations thus have great potential to increase mobilization, deepen legal culture, and provide a distinctive form of oversight in many US jurisdictions.
Method
The authors, after registering a lack of engagement with court watching as a meaningful check (or potential check) on legal systems and actors within socio-legal literature, aimed to take the preliminary step of collecting these groups into the working dataset replicated in the Appendix. Our hope is that this work may serve as a starting point for future researchers seeking to understand the role that court-watching groups play in the US context. The starting point in our data collection method was to consult the existing aggregations of court-watching groups and their work across the United States. We relied on the work of groups like the Abolitionist Law Center (ALC), the American Bar Association (ABA), and the Marshall Project (MP), all of which have highlighted the act of court watching as a worthy method of increasing the transparency and effectiveness of legal actors and institutions. The missions of these nation-wide organizations vary. The ALC (2025), for example, explicitly works to “end mass incarceration, empower impacted people, and protect individuals who encounter the criminal punishment system,” but the ABA and the MP take a more neutral or nonpartisan tack in promoting the practice. The MP, in an article tracking the growing prevalence of court watching in 2018, provides a simple, matter-of-fact justification for the practice: “Legislators can be held accountable to a voting record, but much of what prosecutors do goes unrecorded” (quoted in Schwartzapfel Reference Schwartzapfel2018). While the ABA (2023) does not advocate for court watching as a means for outright legal reform or abolition, it uplifts public access to courts as an overarching public good that legal observers and everyday people should take advantage of in an effort to uphold constitutional standards: “Requiring the work of the courts to be conducted in public view provides an important check on the potential for abuse of power.” This statement illustrates the fact that court watching need not be associated with radical movements or activist aims (we discuss the ideological flexibility of court watching in more detail below).
These groups have, over time, aggregated existing court watching groups in the United States and thus provided a starting point for our analysis, but the existing lists created by these aggregators were far from complete. An online presence, which for many groups is substantial, was the most accessible means by which to trace and analyze court-watching groups, especially those that were not represented in the existing reports and aggregations. Court Watch Massachusetts, Court Watch Chicago, Court Watch New York City (Court Watch NYC), and Court Watch NOLA, for example, all have updated and easily accessible websites along with social media profiles (see the Appendix for the complete dataset and links to each organization). We recorded every group that fit the earlier-mentioned criteria, with a special note if it was still active in its respective community as of the winter of 2024. While this first step in the process allowed us to capture the most well-publicized or well-resourced groups, our process of identifying those groups with a smaller virtual footprint involved a method resembling process tracing in the qualitative social sciences (Collier Reference Collier2011; Beach Reference Beach2018). Starting with an alphabetical list of all US states, the authors searched scholarly and policy-based databases for court-watching or legal accountability groups associated with state-level and other jurisdictions. This state-by-state method significantly expanded the database but still privileged those groups with a substantial media presence. As detailed below, the authors aimed to embody the tenets of qualitative content and narrative analysis using a diverse set of sources, many of which were produced by the court-watching groups themselves (Flick Reference Flick2013).
After a first pass using online searches to find state-specific groups, the authors shifted to a method of more individualized outreach.Footnote 27 Especially in cases where a group’s website or social media had limited activity in the years from 2022 to 2024, the authors would reach out via email and phone to confirm (1) the group’s existence and (2) their status as an active group. As many court-watching groups have emerged amid social movements or activism, their activity often waxes and wanes with current events or popular interest in a given policy area. Acknowledging this, we included both active and inactive groups in our database to provide a historical record of court watching. To be categorized as “active,” groups needed to be currently recruiting, training, or collecting data from volunteer watchers during our analysis in the winter of 2024. By speaking directly with staff through phone and email correspondence, we captured a greater number of observations and aimed to rely less on social media or Internet presence alone. For those groups with recent posts on their social media or website (any made in 2024), training scheduled, or active calls for volunteers, they were included in our universe without contact.
Our state-by-state process tracing lasted for approximately three months in early 2024, after which we fleshed out the database by investigating each group and recording information related to the following categories: state; jurisdiction; year established; mission statement (if available, substituted with one to two sentences on a group’s background if not); noteworthy accomplishments; current activity (active or inactive); website or profile link; and contacted (yes or no), which was used to determine current activity. The authors generated insights about the “purpose” of each group based on the information provided by groups themselves, whether through mission statements or externally released publications (see Figure 3). It is important to note here that many groups included in our dataset identify publicly as nonpartisan. Even though much activism in the criminal legal space is often coded as progressive or conservative (for example, extending sentences and increasing incarceration of defendants is associated with conservative and punitive views of the criminal legal system, while decreasing punitiveness and promoting anti-racism and abolitionist aims are cornerstones of liberal/progressive movements), we steered clear of these ideological labels in the data collection and analysis processes. We used the language of “accountability” and “oversight” rather than the language of conservative/liberal and partisanship to reflect how the groups themselves identify and take seriously our commitment to tracing the mission and focus of the groups as they themselves define them. The authors acknowledge that some groups advance aims that, when considered in the broader context of American political polarization, could be seen as leaning in one direction ideologically. However, in nearly every case we have captured here, the court-watching organizations do not identify their goals as partisan or conservative in nature. Thus, we mirror this tendency in our data collection and analysis, in keeping with our method of deriving conclusions and coding criteria from materials generated by the observed groups themselves.
To give an example, Stop Crime San Francisco (SCSF) has a court-watching group focused on repeat offenders and serious offenses and aims to “ensure judges and prosecutors consider public safety and the rights of victims of crimes when handling criminal cases” (see Appendix).Footnote 28 While victim advocacy groups are often seen as a conservative or punitive segment of the US political landscape, SCSF’s inclusion of court watching into their activist agenda incorporates increasing accountability (an aim that transcends conservative/liberal ideological commitments) into their broader agenda. This shows the complexity of labeling groups as leaning in one direction politically; four other groups have the explicit purpose of decreasing crime by tracking chronic offenders or pushing for higher bail, but many other groups focus on a victim’s rights through an accountability lens.Footnote 29 We acknowledge this complexity and resist the urge to label any court watching group as inherently conservative or progressive for the purposes of this project.
Mothers against Drunk Driving (MADD), one of the nation’s longest-running court-watching groups, provides another illustrative example (see Appendix). MADD tracks conviction and offender rates of drunk-driving cases but with the stated purpose of holding courts and judges accountable, not just increasing punishments or lengthening sentences. Other victim-focused groups are coded as being accountability focused in our data because that is what they claim to be upholding, in their own words.Footnote 30 The accountability category does not mean that all groups are left leaning, but it also does not mean to imply any partisanship at all. Some are openly partisan (for example, Courtwatch Prince George County (Court Watch PG) makes explicit calls to “anti-racist” action and “abolitionist futures”), while others (for example, Court Watch NOLA) are specifically nonpartisan, but all have the same goal of accountability, which does not map neatly onto the contemporary spectrum of political ideology or partisanship.
In investigating these categories, we consulted a mix of scholarly and popular sources in addition to sites, posts, reports, or other materials created by the groups themselves. The sources included local and national newspapers, published reports and abstracts based on data collection, reports developed through the US Department of Justice (especially via the Office of Justice Programs division), coverage from related or aligned civic engagement groups (for example, the League of Women Voters or Neighborhood organizations), and even notes from city council meetings and other local governance entities.Footnote 31 We discuss the results of these research methods below, with special attention to their diversity. We also use selected groups as case studies to demonstrate key aspects of our working definition.
Analysis and preliminary findings
Our analysis resulted in a dataset with fifty-nine observations, each representing individual groups dedicated, at least in part, to court watching in a given jurisdiction. The goals of these groups vary, with some stated purposes including expanding transparency and public knowledge of court proceedings; informing court actors of the need for reform; issuing broader calls of bail reform or abolition; providing a baseline for comparison; and monitoring behavior and consistency of court actors. Data collected often includes quantitative notes such as the duration of court, charges, bail requests and amount granted, and demographics. Qualitative notes are also often used—court watchers often write down statements made in court, their opinions and attitudes toward court actors or the overall experience, and verbatim quotes.Footnote 32 Special attention is often paid to technological difficulties, language barriers, and forms of discrimination. The data are then used in varied ways. As discussed above, the data may be shared with the public or shared exclusively to court actors, kept for organizational use, or collected purely to showcase public concern and care for court proceedings and advocacy. Most importantly, this analysis revealed the vast diversity among groups in terms of jurisdiction, stated purpose, and level of ongoing activity (see Figures 1–3).
Total court watch groups, spring 2024
Notes: Activity confirmed directly with project volunteers/coordinators or through website updates/volunteer signups. Groups that have been contacted with no response and have no recent updates are assumed inactive
Distribution of jurisdiction/case type among court watch groups
Note: Includes one circuit court and one immigration court.
Distribution of stated goal among court watch groups
Notes: * See Analysis section above for discussion of this category and justification.
According to our analysis, thirty-four out of fifty-nine (57.6 percent) court-watching groups are currently active in the United States. This data includes court-watching groups that date back to around 1974, the oldest being the League of Women Voters Illinois, with at least nine groups established before 2000. Of these nine groups, only three (33.3 percent) remain active: the Fund for Modern Courts Citizen Court Monitoring in New York, Minnesota’s WATCH, and the National Council of Jewish Women Chicago North Shore Court Watch in Illinois. Out of the forty-nineFootnote 33 groups established after 2000, thirty-one (63.3 percent) remain active, and eighteen (36.7 percent) are currently inactive. There is a large variety in terms of courts and jurisdictions that are observed. Twenty-three groups observe general criminal and municipal courts. The other thirty-six groups have a more specified range of cases they observe. Six groups observe general family courts, while eight only observe domestic violence cases. Twelve groups focus on bail/arraignment hearings, and six only hear eviction courts. Two groups observe reckless or impaired driving. One group observes general circuit courts, and one group observes immigration courts.
The majority (thirty-nine) of groups emphasize accountability of justice or fairness in the courts as their primary priority or mission. These groups are mostly neutral, objective parties, although six groups also cite strong reform purposes as a main goal. This does not imply that the other groups have no reform purposes—accountability often comes with advocacy, and many groups compile data to publish reports or submit recommendations to justices to improve the judicial process. Three groups emphasize abolition as a main objective, two of which also emphasize bail reform and the other has a variety of other priorities that are aligned with broader movements for abolition or radical reform in the criminal legal system. Five groups focus on decreasing crime by tracking repeat offenders or serious offenses. Six groups have the main goal of bail reform. Six groups cite varying types of reform purposes that did not align with the existing categories and thus merited an additional category in our analysis. This category includes a diverse set of central case types and purposes, including but not limited to the tracking of fees and fines, the advancement of racial justice, and the advancement of “public awareness” of legal proceedings writ large.
In some cases, a group may have multiple purposes; in those cases, the authors determined a central mission by evaluating sources like mission statements and internally created reports. For example, some groups may observe domestic violence or family courts but not have a sustained or exclusive domestic violence focus—they are listed under accountability because they are attempting to hold judges or offenders accountable in multiple judicial contexts. Two court-watching groups that mention domestic violence in their materials are listed under varied reform (see Figure 2). We grouped them under “varied reform” because there is not enough information to assume a purpose other than protecting victims, and they do not limit their observations to domestic violence or family courts. In contrast, all the groups that we coded as focused on accountability/fairness specifically stated that as their goal in court watching. This coding scheme of course forced the authors to make inferences, but we aimed to use the most updated information sources available, whether that was published reports or direct outreach to groups.Footnote 34
Our analysis also revealed that a general bystander effect is another central goal of groups, which connects to the general presence of volunteers and their actions through data collection. A desire to be seen and registered by the judges and other legal actors buttresses this overall desire for generating a bystander effect. For example, Court Watch NYC volunteers wear “conspicuous yellow CWNYC t-shirts” so that “courtroom actors are aware they are being watched,” and the organization claims that judges and prosecutors are “more ‘lenient’” when they recognize court watchers (Court Watch NYC 2020, 6). FCC CourtWatch describes a similar phenomenon, and one volunteer CourtWatcher stated that judges “look over at me with my notebook nervously” and “know they’re being watched” (Freedom Community Center 2021, 4). Again, these anecdotal reports are a fruitful starting point for future research investigating the causal relationship between court observers’ presence and changing judicial outcomes.
Our data collection process also revealed that, as expected based on existing literature, technology has played a unique role in expanding access to, and the effectiveness of, court watching. Many groups use online resources such as Zoom or PowerPoint for training, and publicly available online docket sheets are beneficial for data collection after an in-person volunteer shift has concluded. Data collection tools such as Survey Monkey and Google Forms are also used for the easily accessible submission of volunteer data. Technology such as Zoom and publicly accessible phone lines allowed many groups to continue observing courts during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to their published materials. For example, Circuit Courts of Cook County, Chicago Appleseed, and Arch City Defenders, among many other programs, were able to go fully remote to maintain court watching and evaluate the courts’ responses to COVID-19. These remote observations revealed that the transition to these virtual spaces was often marred by issues of access, such as unstable Internet connections or admission refusal into the meetings by the court administrator or judge. Social media has also played a special role in recruiting volunteers, promoting court watching, and releasing updates. One group, King County Court Watch, is even based entirely on Twitter or X: anonymous users live-tweet from eviction courts and provide information such as the duration of hearings and the levels of tenant presence in the space. Overall, the use of technology has greatly expanded the range of court-watching efforts, and many groups within our dataset remain hybrid today.
Future research on court watching might investigate questions of geographical variation in both the number and type of court-watching groups that are operational in a single state or municipality. In our study, we found that, currently, New York is the state with the most court-watching groups, with five active organizations. This is followed by Illinois, in which at least four groups have been organized, three of which are still active. While Missouri also historically has four groups, only two are still active. Maryland and California each have three active groups. Out of the twenty-eight states that have had court-watching programs, only nineteen (67.9 percent) still have existing active programs.Footnote 35 Additionally, seventeen (60.7 percent) have created more than one program. This variation in the levels of activity among groups highlights the unstable nature of court-watching groups; many rely on grant funding and other sources that ebb and flow with political and social priorities. This database thus captures a moment in time, featuring both active and inactive groups, all of which factor into the process of democratizing legal culture, to which we propose court watching contributes.
The court-watching groups included in our universe of observations also contain significant variation in terms of chronology or the age of the group. For example, the League of Women Voters of Illinois is the oldest court-watching group in the dataset. According to published materials and correspondence from actors within this group, its long tenure has had a substantial impact on the work of other court watchers. In some respects, work by the League of Women Voters laid the foundation for future organizations: groups such as Alaska’s Victims for Justice Court Watch, for example, cite this group as its inspiration (Alaska Judicial Council 2000, 1–2). Similarly long-lasting, Court Watch NYC is often referenced by other groups and news articles as a court-watching group of major importance.Footnote 36 It is a wide-scale program that has received national recognition, especially in the wake of the movement to reform the bail system in New York City, in which CourtWatch NYC was an active participant.Footnote 37 While these two groups boast expansive missions that include goals like increasing accountability, empowering defendants, and generally improving outcomes of the criminal legal system, other programs with impressively long tenures serve a more pointed mission. Beginning in 2015, MADD established the MADD Court Monitoring Program, which focuses on jurisdictions hearing cases involving impaired driving. MADD now activates volunteers to monitor impaired driving cases in roughly 130 counties nationwide. They publish annual reports that track both conviction and offender rates of impaired driving on both a state and national level and identify court watching or monitoring as one method within their broader “campaign to eliminate drunk driving.”Footnote 38
Our data collection process, preliminary descriptive analysis, and brief vignettes of these notable groups all ultimately support our contention that court watching as a practice has grown in both prevalence and geographic diversity in the contemporary moment. Based on the four-part definition established above, we have established a universe of observations that reflects deep diversity in terms of mission, style, and size among court-watching groups, while illustrating the overarching prevalence of volunteer-run court-watching practices in the contemporary United States and across time. Our hope is that this universe of observations represents a productive starting point for researchers aiming for a deeper understanding of the role that court watchers play in upholding and expanding systems of accountability and oversight in legal settings.
Conclusions and opportunities for future research
Judge Warren Burger’s (Reference Burger1964, 23) concerns over the Suppression Doctrine drove his observation in 1964 that “the wrath of public opinion may descend alike on police and judges” without sufficient oversight of those charged with upholding the criminal legal system. In the wake of highly visible police killings and in the era of mass incarceration, this wrath seems far from abating. However, public awareness and displeasure with the seemingly unjust operations of the US criminal legal system can only be generated through sufficient public knowledge of the everyday machinations of the legal system and its associated actors. Court watching, we assert, is a fundamentally accessible, affordable, and well-established means by which to increase that public knowledge and broaden calls for accountability.
We have also found, especially through the process of analyzing group purpose and judicial focus, that court watching as we define it is a practice that has wide appeal across political or ideological spectra and often eschews categorization as solely progressive or conservative in nature. It is also a widespread practice both in terms of time period and geographical space. As our preliminary data collection reflects, this method of grassroots legal activism has been adopted in extremely diverse contexts; the jurisdictional focus, geography, size, and mission of these groups reflect a commitment to the act of court watching that translates across space and time. Given this wide appeal and application, court watching may play a substantial role in generating and creating a baseline of public knowledge that not only increases accountability in courtrooms but also deepens legal consciousness among those unfamiliar or disconnected from legal systems in their everyday lives.
Due to its traditional nature as a grassroots and largely decentralized movement among disparate activist groups and movements, however, the work of court watchers is difficult to trace in a quantifiable way. While some effort to catalog court-watching groups across the nation has been made in activist and media circles, we assert that the academic promise of this activity is deep and should be pursued in an effort to understand what legal activism, legal mobilization, and legal culture entails in the contemporary era.Footnote 39 While this method of legal accountability is more difficult to study systematically than, say, judicial scoring or developments in sentencing guidelines, it still represents an important component of the contemporary US legal landscape. The authors hope that by establishing a widely applicable working definition and collecting preliminary data on the subject, this article may serve as a starting point for those seeking to understand the impacts of court watching across jurisdictions in the United States.
Appendix
Source: Reinke Reference Reinke2024 (draft version).
Note: This table represents a simplified reproduction of the dataset on which this article is based. Columns expressing “mission statement,” “accomplishments,” and “notes” are not reproduced here to facilitate readability.
Author Biographies
Dr. Grace Reinke is an assistant professor of political science and the pre-law advisor at the University of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States.
Natalie Marx is a pre-law undergraduate student and a Tolmas Undergraduate Research Scholar at the University of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States.
