Deutsche Berufsschule Hong Kong
Finalist for the digital region
JUSTLY – easy access to your rights
Justly makes the justice system more accessible and suitable for your everyday life! An online website designed to help you with all your questions about everyday civil law problems and to bring you a little closer to your rights!
STATUS QUO – What is the problem?
Legal tech companies are becoming increasingly popular in Germany. They take the legal steps off their clients‘ hands and charge a commission in return. The existence of these companies shows us that there are some problems in our current justice system. These prevent individuals from claiming their rights on their own and to the full extent.
1. The first fundamental problem is the lack of knowledge of the law and the lack of awareness of one’s own rights.
2. The second problem is the analogue functioning and structure of our judicial system, which is incomprehensible to most people. (lack of digitalization)
3. The final problem is the lack of a user-friendly interface that bundles information access to the law for the masses.
As a solution we have developed the online platform Justly.
What is JUSTLY?
The website guides you through a path of multiple choice questions that allow Justly to understand your problem. After defining the problem, Justly checks your legal claim and lists your legal options. Now you can decide on your own, which further steps you want to take. For further help, you can also download the sample letter. With it you can get in contact with the conflicting parties out of court, but in a serious way and enforce your rights.
With Justly, we are creating a digital approach to justice that will help citizens become more involved in the legal process and develop a greater understanding of their own rights and our justice system. By increasing understanding and interest, Justly helps to make our justice system more transparent.
Development of JUSTLY
We, the team of the German Business Faculty Hong Kong, together with the Max Planck Institute and Professor Dr. Hanjo Hamann worked on the topic: Knowing what is right – How does the justice system make the leap into the digital age? It was particularly important to us to create a solution idea that was realizable and would help especially our generation in the long term. That’s why we decided to develop an online platform. Along the way, we discussed our idea with many experts who gave us important professional input and supported us in our idea.
Their YES! topic
Knowing what is right: How does the justice system leap into the digital age?
by Hanjo Hamann (Max Planck Institute)
The diesel scandal has brought a core problem of German jurisprudence back to the attention of the (professional) public: Very few court decisions are published at all. Many citizens consider the court system to be a “closed book”, and a recent study shows that the proportion of published judgments has practically never exceeded 1 per cent of all decisions handed down since 1971. So if even legal experts do not (or cannot) know 99 out of 100 court decisions, what does that mean for our legal system?
On the one hand, it means that economically motivated actors “from outside” can influence which decisions see the light of day – and which do not. On the other hand, it creates incentives for judges to control “from within” which of their decisions become visible and thus open to criticism. (Not only) In the diesel scandal, an interplay of these and other factors led to a distortion of our knowledge about the law created by the judiciary that is inscrutable even for experts.
So far, this state of affairs has been justified primarily with two claims that are rarely questioned: On the one hand, it is said to be inadmissible for reasons of data protection to publish court decisions without elaborate anonymisation; on the other hand, even in a democratic constitutional state, only that which is “worthy of publication” must be published.
Are these claims convincing? What (other) hurdles can be identified for the lack of digitisation of the German judiciary? (Who) Is interested at all in what German district courts decide? (How) Can inhibitions be reduced and incentives created to make the judiciary more transparent? Who should finance this, and are there practicable alternatives to a central official publication platform? Which social actors could shape the change most sustainably – and how?
Hanjo Hamann
Foto: Mario Iser 2021
Hanjo Hamann studierte Jura in Heidelberg und Hamburg, mit weiteren Ausbildungsstationen in Erfurt, Speyer, Leipzig und Tübingen. Er promovierte in Bonn und Jena in den Rechts- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften und ist seit 2016 an einem Max-Planck-Institut in Bonn und an der Freien Universität in Berlin tätig. Auslandsaufenthalte führten ihn nach Italien, China, Südafrika und in die USA. Er beschäftigt sich mit Vertrags- und Unternehmensrecht samt ihrer Bezüge zu empirischen Nachbardisziplinen wie den Verhaltens- und Sprachwissenschaften.
