Judgment Record Room β

A gentle, accessible calendar that helps anyone—including students—understand Japanese Supreme Court judgments and reach the official sources.

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Inspiration

Supreme Court judgments can affect everyday life, but the original documents often feel intimidating to people without legal knowledge.

I wanted to create something that is not simply another legal database, but a safe and approachable gateway to primary information: a place where anyone, including students, can understand what happened and then verify the official source for themselves.

What it does

Judgment Record Room Beta presents selected judgments officially published by the Supreme Court of Japan through a gentle, calendar-based interface.

Users can:

  • Find dates with judgments through a calendar
  • View the judgments associated with a selected date
  • Read short, plain-language summaries
  • Understand what was disputed, what the court decided, and why
  • See the judges involved and the types of opinions provided
  • Open the official court page and the full-text judgment PDF

The Build Week prototype contains five real Supreme Court judgments from March 2024.

How I built it

The visitor-facing application was built with Next.js, React, and TypeScript.

The five judgments were manually selected from the Supreme Court of Japan’s official public website and stored as local structured sample data. This prototype does not use scraping, a database, user accounts, or a runtime AI API, so judges can run and test it without external credentials.

How I used GPT-5.6 and Codex

GPT-5.6 helped me explore how complex official judgments could be explained in accessible language while preserving neutrality and avoiding political or judicial evaluation.

Codex transformed the project specifications and visual wireframes into a working application. It implemented the responsive interface, calendar navigation, judgment list and detail views, local data integration, source links, automated tests, documentation, and GitHub Actions validation.

Codex also helped identify important product decisions, including keeping official sources visible, clearly labeling AI-assisted summaries, avoiding absolute or evaluative language, and separating the public prototype from secrets and future runtime infrastructure.

Responsible AI decisions

The project follows several safety principles:

  • AI must not decide whether a judgment is good or bad
  • AI must not evaluate individual judges
  • AI must not encourage a political position
  • AI-assisted summaries must include a disclaimer
  • Users must always be able to reach the official primary source
  • The site must not be treated as legal advice

The goal is to support understanding, not replace the original judgment or the user’s own thinking.

Challenges

The main challenge was balancing accessibility with accuracy. Simplifying legal language can make information easier to understand, but it can also remove important nuance.

I addressed this by separating each explanation into clear sections, preserving source links, adding explicit disclaimers, and treating every summary as a guide rather than an authoritative replacement.

Accomplishments

I created a complete visitor journey from calendar to judgment list, detailed explanation, and official source.

The project also includes:

  • Five real Supreme Court judgments
  • Responsive visitor-facing UI
  • Local sample data
  • Automated data tests
  • TypeScript and ESLint validation
  • A successful production build through GitHub Actions
  • Bilingual documentation and responsible-AI guidance

What I learned

I learned that trust is not created only through technical accuracy. It also depends on interface design, careful wording, visible limitations, and easy access to primary information.

What’s next

Future development may include additional judgments, a human review workflow, search, accessibility improvements, archived source links, and carefully controlled OpenAI API integration using environment variables.

The long-term goal is to help more people reach public information safely and think for themselves.

Acknowledgments

Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the teams behind GPT-5.6 and Codex. These tools helped bring to life a wish of mine—small in its first form, but enormous in what it means to me.

Thank you so much.

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