Reflections on the reconfiguration of access to justice

This paper draws on a series of research studies of the last two decades of legal aid reforms to consider their wider social and political meaning. They are evaluated against a ‘master ideal’ of access to justice rather than a fictive golden age. It will be argued that despite New Labour's rhetoric of social inclusion and the positive initiatives this sometimes produced, the neo-liberal character of the reforms has eroded both social rights and access to justice. Their internal logic requires the imposition of a market and the use of least cost labour, thereby reducing the guarantee of due process to the lowest common denominator: consumption of a legal service becomes a sufficient alternative to just outcomes.     

The power model of juvenile justice

The author first identifies those characteristics which distinguish the juvenile justice system from its more widelypublicized counterpart, the criminal justice system. He next demonstrates how many textbooks in this area fail to portray adequately the uniqueness of juvenile justice. He concludes by developing and explaining the “Power Model,” which more accurately describes the juvenile justice system.     

Community,market, and state: Reflections on their potential for achieving economic justice

This paper investigates the potential of distinct societal decision-making and coordinating mechanisms as means of achieving economic justice. Within the enormous diversity of actual institutional arrangements that guide and shape whatever happens in economies, three overarching ideal types of mechanisms which separately or in combination enable mankind to cope with its economic challenge are discernible: communities, markets, and states. Each of these ideal types represents a different way in which economic decisions are made and the economic actions of members of society are coordinated. The specific question to be answered is how each of these mechanisms can contribute to the solution of the problem of economic justice in modern times.     

A general model for criminal justice planning

Criminal justice agencies have fallen under harsh criticism for their seeming inability to expand and adapt at a rate commensurate with the accelerated growth of crime. A general planning model for criminal justice agencies is suggested to help effect the establishment of orderly, systematic, and continuous processes of setting objectives, anticipating the future and bringing these anticipations to bear on critical present decisions.     

Teaching criminal justice research: An experiential model

Teaching research methods to undergraduate criminal justice students typically has been viewed as problematic. Students often experience considerable anxiety concerning required research courses and frequently lack the motivation to learn and appreciate the usefulness of research. Experiential case studies have been successfully utilized to teach criminal justice students the application of theory in practical situations. An evaluation of the experiential model was made in a post-test only control group research design with two groups of criminal justice research students. The results of the comparison supported the experiential approach and showed greater success utilizing this method over a traditional teaching method.     

Restorative justice: the indigenous justice system

Dramatically different beliefs about justice will produce dramatically different methods for achieving justice. The beliefs underlying the traditional Indigenous restorative justice systems, systems that dramatically differ from the European-based system practiced in the USA are presented. The discussion highlights the legacy of colonialism for tribal communities and the resilience and creative resistance that have continued to characterize the spirit and ingenuity of Indigenous peoples.     

恢复性司法的价值与理念——报应性司法和恢复性司法比较研究

犯罪包含着犯罪人与受害方，犯罪人与社会及其国家之间的衔突。报应性司法采用形而上的哲学方法分析犯罪原因，认为犯罪是犯罪人自由选择的结果，犯罪所侵害的主要是国家的统治秩序，因此，在“以怨报怨”观念支配下，主张犯罪人承担刑罚这样的抽象责任。恢复性司法以实证的方法研究犯罪，认为犯罪是社区关系失调的产物，犯罪侵害的不仅是国家利益，还包括被害人利益和社区利益，因此，在“以直报怨”观念支配下，主张犯罪人要面对受害方承担道歉、赔偿等具体责任。     

Doing justice to justice

Adshead's recognition that only when taken together can the many different conceptions of justice accommodate what is called for in the particularly demanding setting of forensic mental health care, is to be applauded. Each must be honoured and built into the systems of assessment and treatment that are the tasks of the forensic psychiatrist, she demonstrates. Adshead's far‐reaching revisions could resolve much that is troubling about the present practice of forensic psychiatry. Yet how much these revisions can overcome the moral dilemmas associated with dual roles in forensic psychiatry, is not so clear.     

Disputes in Japan: A cross-cultural test of the procedural justice model

Research on procedural justice has provided ample evidence that people are concerned not only with the outcome of disputes but also with the fairness of the procedures used to resolve disputes. The majority of the studies examining the importance of procedural justice have been conducted in the United States and Western European countries. This study tests the generality of the procedural justice model by examining the importance of fair procedures to people in a non-Western country, Japan. This study also examines the meaning of a fair procedure from a legal perspective. Past studies have drawn the procedural justice criteria considered from social psychology. We examine several additional criteria derived from the legal concept of due process of law. Results indicate that fair procedures are more important to subjects than fair outcomes in both a traffic accident dispute and a breach of contract case. Furthermore, across both types of disputes, fairness concerns are more important than nonfairness concerns. These results are consistent with findings from studies conducted in Western countries. A new finding that emerges from the study is that the clarity with which a procedure is formulated and presented is a strong determinant of procedural justice judgments.     

Social justice and legal justice

The main aim of this paper is to challenge the validity of the distinction between legal justice and social justice. It is argued that what we usually call legal justice is either an application of the more fundamental notion of social justice to legal rules and decisions or is not a matter of justice at all. In other words, the only correct uses of the notion of legal justice are derivative from the notion of social justice and, hence, the alleged conflicts between criteria of social and legal justice result from the confusion about the proper relationship between these two concepts. Two views about the social justice/legal justice dichotomy are of particular importance and will provide the focus for the argument: this dichotomy is sometimes identified with a classical distinction between distributive and commutative justice and sometimes with the distinction between substantive and procedural justice.     

Managing crime through quality education: A model of justice

The study examines the role of quality education in access to justice, using a panel data of 21 diversified countries for the period of 1990–2015. The findings show that there is a positive relationship between the presence of scientific and technical journals (STJ) articles and crime rates. The R&D expenditures does not substantially reduce crime rate while per capita income, trademark applications, and technical cooperation grants significantly reduce crime rates across countries. The panel fixed effect (FE) model confirmed the inverted U-shaped relationship between per capita income (GDPpc) and crime rate in the presence of STJ, while this result is changed in the case of GMM estimator. The results of panel causality confirmed the unidirectional causality running from crime rate to STJ and R&D expenditures, while there is bidirectional causality between i) GDPpc and technical cooperation grants, and between ii) energy efficiency and refugee population by country. The variance decomposition analysis (VDA) shows that R&D expenditures have a greater share to influence crime rate, while technical cooperation grants will affect STJ for the next 10 years time. This finding bolsters the conversation on the relationship between education and a reduction in crime rates.     

Critical justice consciousness: Social injustice and the criminal justice system

In this essay I examine the importance of social justice to my identity and the changing interpretation of my “justice consciousness” resulting from changes in my work life. Drawing on my academic experience as well as my experience as an attorney, I describe the meaning that social justice has for me. I also examine the connections that I see between social injustice and the operation of the critical justice system.