1 Envisioning the Next Step in e-Justice: In Search of the Key to Provide Easy Access to Cross-border Justice for All UsersErnst Steigenga, Marco VelicognaEnvisioning the Next Step in e-Justice Ernst Steigenga ICT Adviser, Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice, ICT Policy Department Marco Velicogna Researcher, Research Institute on Judicial systems, National Research Council of Italy (IRSIG-CNR) Summary: This paper is the result of a long chain of working activities and cooperation which arose out of a problem: Cross-border legal procedures in civil matters are not producing the expected results regardless of all e- justice investments done so far. The aim of this present work is to explore how existing technical and legal components and those under development could be used or reinvented to better address the problem. The question of how cross-border e-justice service provision should proceed will also be addressed. This paper has been produced with the financial support of the Justice Programme of the European Union (API for Justice project JUST/2014/JACC/AG/E-JU/6965). The contents of this paper are the sole responsibility of Ernst Steigenga and Marco Velicogna, and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Commission. (A) Introduction This paper has been written by two practitioners of the EU e-justice after more than five years of working together on this topic in the EU co-founded e-CODEX Large Scale project and in other initiatives such as the EU Council Working Party on e-Law. The Conference “From Common Rules to Best Practices in European Civil Procedure” held in Rotterdam on the 25 th and 26 th of February 2016 provided the opportunity to take a step back from the EU e-justice operational activities and to reflect on our experience. It also provided the motivation to begin adopting a broader perspective on the work that needed to be done to make cross-border e-justice service provision viable. The e-CODEX experience has taught us the risk of taking a perspective that is too narrow whilst allowing us to discover the potential of digitization of European Justice. The organizational, legal, social and political complexity of developing a pan-European infrastructure capable of supporting legally valid cross- border judicial communication has already demonstrated in the initial phases of the e-CODEX project the inadequacy of the “technological determinism and instrumental rationality underlying systems development”, 1 which characterises the “current orthodoxy within IS theory and research” 2 and the current ICT development practice, to address the problem at hand. This perspective on design and implementation of Information Systems is based on software engineering and information systems design methodologies “which focus on the development and use of information systems in narrow technical/rational terms”. 3 This is a direct result of “the initial diffusion of business applications of computers and networks, and the highly formalized nature of programming and software, suggested a vigorous and structured understanding and representation of the multiple systems practices, from requirement analysis to use, maintenance, and documentation.” 4 The limitations of this deterministic perspective, not giving sufficient attention to the open nature of the technical, 1 D. Howcroft, “Information Systems”, in M. Alvesson et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies, OUP, 2009, 393. 2 Howcroft, supra n. 1, at 393. 3 Howcroft, supra n. 1, at 394. 4 C. Ciborra, The labyrinths of information: Challenging the wisdom of systems: Challenging the wisdom of systems, OUP, 2002, at 1.