France bans some litigation analytics

In what appears to be a breathtaking overreaction to a privacy concern, France has banned statistical reporting about individual judges’ decisions:

The new law, encoded in Article 33 of the Justice Reform Act, is aimed at preventing anyone – but especially legal tech companies focused on litigation prediction and analytics – from publicly revealing the pattern of judges’ behaviour in relation to court decisions.

A key passage of the new law states:

‘The identity data of magistrates and members of the judiciary cannot be reused with the purpose or effect of evaluating, analysing, comparing or predicting their actual or alleged professional practices.’ 

France Bans Judge Analytics, 5 Years In Prison For Rule Breakers

This raises many issues of free speech, transparency, and just plain old protectionism:

This will likely play as kind of a tired joke about France, but there's a deep point here about measurement and power. There isn't a profession in the world that wouldn't impose such a ban on measurement and analysis of this sort about themselves, if they could get away with it.

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) June 5, 2019