Last reviewed: July 2026 · For use in England & Wales · eLitigant is a Community Interest Company (No. 16566612), not a law firm.
The final part of “The Public’s Court.” Part One measured the default machine; Part Two traced how the public’s eye left the courtroom. This part is about how it comes back.
The courts are already leading
Start with credit where it is due, because the direction of travel is real. The Supreme Court has streamed its hearings for years. The Court of Appeal has allowed broadcasting since 2013. And on 28 July 2022, at the Old Bailey, something genuinely historic happened: a Crown Court judge’s sentencing remarks were televised for the first time, under the Crown Court (Recording and Broadcasting) Order 2020 — with 34 broadcasts of sentencing remarks in the first year. The senior judiciary chose this. Openness is not being forced on the courts; the courts are building it.
What the law still says everywhere else
Beneath those flagship reforms, the older law still governs the ordinary courtroom. Section 41 of the Criminal Justice Act 1925 makes it an offence to photograph or film in court; section 9 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 makes it a contempt to record sound without the court’s permission. A litigant in person who quietly records their own county court hearing — to review what was said, or simply because everything in their life is recorded — commits a contempt. The one participant with the least experience of court is the one with the least means of studying what happened in it.
The official record exists — hearings are recorded by the court itself — but obtaining a transcript costs real money, often hundreds of pounds for a single hearing, priced by the page from approved transcribers. Open justice that can be read only at that price is open in principle and gated in practice.
The receipt principle
Here is the belief this series has been building to, stated in the spirit of Scott v Scott: the public funds the courts, and open justice is the receipt. Every argument the House of Lords accepted in 1913 — publicity as the guard of the system, public trial as the source of confidence — applies with most force in the courts the public actually uses: the county courts, where 1,200,000 judgments were entered in 2025 and where the litigant usually stands alone. The senior courts stream; the people’s courts should not be the last dark rooms in the building.
What would meeting the principle look like? Nothing radical — only the existing direction of travel, extended: affordable or free transcripts for litigants in their own cases; observable hearings as the norm the rules already state; and the same broadcasting confidence the Crown Court found in 2022 arriving, in time, downstairs. Every step of it protects judges as much as litigants — that was Bentham’s whole point.
Where we stand
We prepare paperwork; we do not campaign against anyone. But a company built on the promise of equal footing is allowed one civic belief, and this is ours: a system this good should be easy to see being good. The rules already promise it — “justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done” (Lord Hewart CJ, R v Sussex Justices, ex parte McCarthy [1924] 1 KB 256). Technology has finally made the promise cheap to keep. It is, as we said on 22 July, a technological thing — and limits of technology are the kind that lift.
Impartial justice, accessible to all. We are funded by the users, for the people who need us most.