Tribunal Reform: Proportionate Dispute Resolution and the Pursuit of Administrative Justice

The article considers some unresolved policy choices associated with the implementation of 'proportionate dispute resolution', one of the most interesting ideas in the Department of Constitutional Affairs' White Paper Transforming Public Services: Complaints, Redress and Tribunals , published in 2004. It attempts to put the White Paper into context by tracing the Government's concern with tribunal reform over the last 50 years. It briefly compares the Franks Report, published in 1957, with the Leggatt Report, published in 2001, and outlines the steps that led to the publication, three years later, of the White Paper. It then analyses the similarities and differences in the approaches to reform taken by the Leggatt Report and the White Paper. The article focuses on the principle of 'proportionate dispute resolution', the idea that the ways in which cases are dealt with should reflect the nature of the dispute and what the person in dispute with a public body wishes to achieve. Seven policy options are considered, all of which hold out the prospect of enhancing administrative justice, either by reducing the incidence of disputes or by handling them more effectively. They are then assessed in terms of how well they are likely to do so.     

The Journey to Comprehensibility: Court Forms as the First Barrier to Accessing Justice

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The article explores the comprehensibility of court forms by providing a quantitative overview...     

Swaying the Hand of Justice: The Internal and External Dynamics of Regime Change at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

This article develops a conflict approach for studying the field of international criminal law. Focusing on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, we draw on Burawoy's (2003 ) elaboration of reflexive ethnography to determine how external political changes affect the work of an international legal institution. We explore how political frameworks of legal liberalism, ad hoc legalism, and legal exceptionalism result in internal office, organizational, and normative changes within this Tribunal, thereby linking national political transformations with the construction of the global. Drawing on rolling field interviews and a two-wave panel survey, we conclude that the claims to universals that underwrite transnational legal fields cannot be understood solely through an analysis of external political forces, but must be combined with attention to how these are refracted through internal organizational change within international institutions.     

从利益到权利——以正义为中介与内核

实现利益与解决利益冲突需要评价利益的正当性 ,只有获得正当性评价的利益才能上升为权利。平等、自由主体的共同参与是确立正义原则的前提 ,确立方式只能采用多数规则 (即民主方式 )。正当性评价的结果即正当利益 ,包括个人正当利益 (普遍的个人利益和“具体个人的善”)和社会公共利益。正当利益的制度化即权利。利益、正义与权利三者间的关系由此贯通。简单说 ,正义是评价利益正当性与否的程序 ,也是正当性评价的结果———正当利益 ;正义是权利的内核 ,亦是利益走向权利的桥梁。     

从程序正义到摆平“正义”:法官的多重角色分析

法院如何建构其主体性?是当下中国社会面临的时代之问。在规则之治、程序正义的逻辑下展开运作的司法因其制度刚性有余而操作柔性不足,难以有效回应中国社会仍停留在传统的具体情境,从而遭到实用主义的解构。但是,在调审合一制度路径下游刃有余的实用主义司法哲学实际上亦并不足以构成对法院主体性的命题支撑,甚至可能是更加错误的道路。作为法院主体性的命题表达,能够体现法院明确的司法功能并与其他权力部门相区分的主体特质始终只在于独立的审判。     

The Practice of Law as an Obstacle to Justice: Chinese Lawyers at Work

This article helps strengthen our comparative and theoretical understanding of lawyers as gatekeepers to justice by analyzing the screening practices of lawyers in a non-Western context. The explanation for Chinese lawyers' aversion to representing workers with labor grievances focuses on their own working conditions, on the organization of their legal labor, and on their evaluations of the moral character of prospective clients. By linking the screening practices of Chinese lawyers to their socioeconomic insecurity and to popular stereotypes informing and legitimating their screening decisions, this article identifies institutional and cultural obstacles not only to the official justice system but also to cause lawyering. After establishing motives for screening clients, this article then demonstrates lawyers' screening methods: by defining legal reality in strategic and often misleading ways, lawyers use the law as a weapon against the interests of the individuals who seek their help.     

The Rise of Digital Justice: Courtroom Technology,Public Participation and Access to Justice

This article addresses a little discussed yet fundamentally important aspect of legal technological transformation: the rise of digital justice in the courtroom. Against the backdrop of the government's current programme of digital court modernisation in England and Wales, it examines the implications of advances in courtroom technology for fair and equitable public participation, and access to justice. The article contends that legal reforms have omitted any detailed consideration of the type and quality of citizen participation in newly digitised court processes which have fundamental implications for the legitimacy and substantive outcomes of court‐based processes; and for enhancing democratic procedure through improved access to justice. It is argued that although digital court tools and systems offer great promise for enhancing efficiency, participation and accessibility, they simultaneously have the potential to amplify the scope for injustice, and to attenuate central principles of the legal system, including somewhat paradoxically, access to justice.     

Measuring Perceptions of Economic Inequality and Justice: An Empirical Assessment

Social Justice Research - How should we measure people’s perceptions of—and attitudes about—economic inequality? A recent literature seeks to quantify the level of...     

Paradigm Muddle: The Threat to Restorative Justice Posed by Its Merger with Community Justice

The restorative justice movement has great potential to reform the way society responds to crime and wrongdoing. One might logically assume that the greatest challenge to the new restorative justice paradigm is the traditional punitive criminal justice paradigm itself. A more immediate threat, however, is posed by merging community justice, another approach to reforming the justice system, with restorative justice. Community justice has superficial similarities to restorative justice but relies on the underlying authoritarian assumptions of the existing criminal justice system and on processes that exclude most of those individuals directly affected by the offense. This paper clarifies and contrasts the key elements of both the restorative justice and the community justice paradigms and explains the threat to restorative justice posed by combining and confusing the two.     

立法公正的实现与保障机制

立法公正不仅包括立法程序上的公正 ,还包括立法的实体公正 ,而立法实体的公正则是经由程序公正而获得的。立法程序公正的基本要件是程序公开、程序参与、程序自治、程序中立、程序效率等。实现立法公正要进一步完善公众立法的直接参与制度、立法公开制度、立法回避制度以及立法听证制度等