The paper sets out what courtwatching is and gives some examples from various countries. It argues that a closer engagement with courtwatching in legal geography will yield insights into the issues of visibility, publicness, witnessing, and embodiment that surround court observations.

The shift towards dispute resolution taking place outside traditional legal arenas is fundamentally changing the relationship between space and law, presenting legal geography with pressing new research opportunities. This paper explores how the emerging geographies of publicness, materiality, access to justice and communication shed light on the consequences of alternative and online dispute resolution. Crucially, these consequences raise urgent interdisciplinary questions for geography and law. We set out these questions and suggest that legal geography will be best placed to address them by working through some of the practical, applied ramifications of its concepts and perspectives.

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