Open science to advance reproducible legal research: Investigating IMM v The Queen

Reproducibility and open access are central to the research process, enabling researchers to verify and build on each other’s work and allowing the public to rely on that work. These ideals are perhaps even more important in law, a field that actively seeks to inform legal decisions and policy. Unfortunately, a growing body of critical work finds that empirical legal research is rarely reproducible. In this article, I suggest that recent advances from the open science and technology movement provide efficient mechanisms for improving some aspects of empirical legal research. More specifically, this article provides an example of a reproducible and open analysis of a controversial criminal evidence decision. It uses open-source software and an app1 that allows readers to access and verify the judicial decisions under analysis. This case is the 2016 High Court of Australia decision, IMM v The Queen (‘IMM’), which appeared to limit safeguards against evidence known to contribute to wrongful convictions. Analysis of this decision finds that, as commentators initially worried, IMM has been applied broadly to admit several forms of dangerous evidence.