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Courtwatching involves grassroots efforts to observe the day-to-day work of decision making in justice systems, usually undertaken by activists as a way to scrutinise and challenge the power of legal professionals such as judges. This paper argues for closer attention to courtwatching in legal geographical research. Numerous courtwatching programmes exist around the world, and the first part of the paper surveys some of these, giving a sense of their diversity, the challenges they can face, and the influence that they have. The second part of the paper uses courtwatching to explore questions of visibility, publicness, witnessing, and embodiment in legal research into courts, trials, and hearings. It argues that courtwatching highlights the complexity of legal publicness, problematising the binary notion of "closed" or "open" hearings, and also raises important questions about the ethical differences between watching and witnessing. Finally, in the context of proliferating ways in which courts are becoming public via digital means of watching, such as TV and podcasts, the paper asks what difference it makes to actually be there, in the flesh, to watch legal processes.

There is ongoing concern that Britain’s courts are places that are overwhelming, disorientating and confusing for court users. Asylum seekers are some of the most marginalised people in society and existing research highlights the difficulties they face in disclosing evidence throughout the legal process. Without an accessible process, appellants may be unable or unwilling to speak and participate in their appeal, and therefore important pieces of evidence may not be considered and justice may not be served. Although a lot of attention has been paid to asylum law by academics and policy makers alike, its day to day implementation often escapes critical academic scrutiny. This is arguably because relatively few non-legal scholars study the law, meaning that most analysis is focussed on substantive and doctrinal legal issues rather than questions of process, implementation and experience. It is also extremely time consuming to observe a sufficient number of hearings to be able to draw general conclusions about day to day issues. Our project adopts an inter-disciplinary perspective on the day to day workings of asylum law within the UK’s asylum appeal hearings. In the following sections we report on a project which examined what happens during asylum appeals by closely observing them from the public areas of hearing rooms. Our observations ran from 2013 to 2019. We complement the perspective our observations offer with interview evidence from appellants as well as others involved in the process.

This paper provides an example of how TDM could be applied in Australia with particular reference to university campuses. After considering the different characteristics of Australian university campuses in general, three Melbourne campuses were chosen as representative case studies. These consisted of a inner city campus (University of Melbourne), a inner suburban campus (Swinburne University) and an outer suburban campus (Monash University). Structured interviews were carried out with student and staff representatives involved with transport on campus. The interviews revealed a lack of consideration given to transport as an issue (as opposed to parking) at the three campuses. A subsequent survey was conducted of university administration representatives from campuses around Australia. That larger survey confirmed that Australian university campuses do not have any defined policies or decision making processes focused on campus transport issues. A model campus TDM program is developed based on the review of the available literature and the information on university travel characteristics collected from the three detailed case studies. Although the program is simple, it provides a basis on which individual campuses can establish a TDM program and then develop it further to complement their specific conditions. This paper is to be presented at the 19th ARRB TR Conference to be held in Sydney, 6-11 December 1998.