Towards Ethical Judicial Analytics: Assessing Readability of Immigration and Asylum Decisions in the United Kingdom

Motivated by the broader issues of open justice and access to justice, this paper explores the ethical application of judicial analytics through the lens of an assessment of readability of written judicial decisions. To that end the paper aims 1) to review and reproduce for the UK context previous work that assesses readability of legal texts, and 2) to reflect critically on the ethical implications of applied judicial analytics. Focusing on the use case of assessing the readability of judicial Immigration and Asylum decisions in the UK, we put forward recommendations for ethical judicial analytics that aim to produce results that meet the needs of and are accepted by the stakeholders of the legal system.