Real-world assignments for restorative justice education

Academic coursework on restorative justice is rapidly emerging in professional schools. As members of applied disciplines entrusted to serve the public good, students must be readily able to transfer classroom-based learning into real world application. This paper describes a weekend intensive, multidisciplinary graduate school course and how three ‘real world’ assignments are used to integrate restorative justice values, principles, and practices. The assignments include interviews with criminal justice representatives, group projects that propose restorative justice practices for addressing social issues and legal cases, and participation in community-based programs. The assignments use processes grounded in experiential learning theory to underscore various dimensions of restorative justice. They also convey and deepen the understanding of restorative justice principles and practices while at the same time develop a sense of moral agency in students.     

‘Omnus et Singulatim’: Establishing the Relationship Between Transitional Justice and Neoliberalism

First developed by human rights lawyers and activists, transitional justice emerged from the so-called third wave of democratisations in Latin America. Over the last 30 years, transitional justice has risen to become a ‘global project’ of global governance. Locating the emergence of transitional justice within the global rise of neoliberalism, this article shows that transitional justice serves an important function in regards to the particularly neoliberal contours of many transitions. Understanding this relation, the article argues, is best served with recourse to what Wendy Brown describes as neoliberalism’s practice of omnus et singulatim, a double process through which ‘communities’ are gathered together as stakeholders to take part in economic activities whilst simultaneously being individualised as ‘responsibilised’ and self-sufficient entrepreneurial units. Taking this concept, I argue that transitional justice also undertakes a process of omnus et singulatim that usefully prefigures and supports processes of neoliberalisation during ‘transition’. Transitional justice, it concludes, does the necessary work of bringing conflictual, traumatised, societies back together, whilst doing so on terms that do not threaten but instead prefigure the individualising demands made upon subjects at the sites of neoliberal transition.     

“O me! O me! How i love the earth”: William Morris’s News from Nowhere and the birth of sustainable society

Arguing from an ecocritical perspective, in this article I seek to show that Morris, in his ‘green’ utopia News from Nowhere, envisaged a new social order in which communities are socially just, participatory, independent, economically viable and environmentally sustainable. I will argue that Morris, by stressing the need for a decentralized and polycentric country and by showing how co‐operation, as opposed to competition, can form a symbiosis between the members of the society, effectively linked the local with the global. I will show that Morris, turning against systematized globalization as portrayed in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, gives an example of a ‘sustainable’ globalization that shares much common ground with the current politics of bioregionalism. I will finally suggest that Morris’s vision of London as an ecological city, where waste has been abolished and human beings live in harmony with nature while respecting social justice, is more urgent than ever and can be instrumental as a vision for our future life.     

Social justice jurisprudence of clinical education programme: A paradigm shift from legal education to justice education

The legal profession has remained relevant in bringing about positive transformation in society — with leaders, policymakers, and change makers around the world mostly possessing a background in the law. That said, the trust, and positive image, enjoyed by legal professionals continues on a declining path. Considered more glamorous, the legal profession has gone astray from the path of social justice. In this article, I argue that the negative perception of legal professionals is, in large part, because of the way legal professionals are taught and trained in law schools. I argue that legal teaching pedagogy in South Asia, and generally in developing countries, is a product of colonial structure. Even after the so-called decolonisation movement, law schools and universities, for example in South Asia, institutionalised a legal pedagogy unsuited to the epistemic actualities of their societies. A law student in South Asia was and continues to be taught the Western conception of what the law is and its relationship to justice. In a legal culture carrying the transplanted laws of the colonisers, the students of developing countries are meticulously trained in the technical skills of reasoning and interpretation by applying Eurocentric guidelines of positivist construction. In light of this, I propose a shift in legal education: to transform the existing legal education and pedagogy into ‘justice education’. I focus on the ancient principles — located in the Eastern legal philosophy — of empirical reasoning and the importance of the human nature of sociability in arriving at social justice. To combat the tendency of insulating law students from societal problems, I propose a social justice-driven legal pedagogy. I have also reflected on some practices that ‘are’ and highlighted other practices that ‘ought to be’. My thesis connotes that the legal profession has an innate role in building the capability of individuals who are deprived and excluded. In line with it, I present examples of scalable clinical legal education being practised specially by the Kathmandu School of Law that can create multidimensional legal professionalism.

     

Political Liberalism, Ethos Justice, and Gender Equality

Susan Okin criticizes John Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’ because it does not apply principles of justice directly to gender relations within households. We explain how one can be a ‘political liberal feminist’ by distinguishing between two kinds of justice: the first we call ‘legitimacy justice’, conceptions of which apply to the ‘legally coercive structure’ of society; the second we call ‘ethos justice’, conceptions of which apply to citizens’ ‘non-coercive’ relations. We agree with Okin that a society in which most persons act in accordance with ‘gender equal’ ethos justice is morally superior to one in which most persons do not. A shared commitment to a particular conception of ethos justice, however, cannot be required by a conception of legitimacy justice. A political liberal feminist is committed to promoting gender equality with respect to both legitimacy justice and ethos justice, but recognizes that different means are necessary to do so.     

State Power,the Politics of Debt and Confronting Neoliberal Authoritarianism

As an intellectual, economic, political and legal project, neoliberalism is not directed towards the rolling back of the state as an aim in itself. While its deregulatory tendencies, its commodification of public services and the undermining of systems of social welfare superficially suggest a generalised reduction in state power, it has been clear from the early 1980s that one of neoliberalism’s primary concerns has been the authoritarian reshaping of state power to engineer particular social outcomes, whether in criminal justice, the disciplining of organised labour, the militarisation of national territory and migration, or the extension and deepening of regimes of austerity. This article introduces the recent work of Maurizio Lazzarato, who has argued that the asymmetrical creditor-debtor relationship is now the archetype of contemporary, neoliberal social relations. Ultimately, Lazzarato’s perspective tends to exaggerate the totalising powers of finance capital and leads him to endorse a form of political voluntarism, which fails to address the role of the neoliberal state as a site for forms of authoritarianism which are not solely generated by the debt relation. As a response, it will be suggested that aspects of Nicos Poulantzas’s concept of ‘authoritarian statism’ can be used to both strengthen our understanding of the authoritarian characteristics of the neoliberal state, and to imagine possibilities for resisting its expressions of power.     

Distributive Justice Antecedents of Race and Gender Disparities in First-Year College Performance

Public education is a sphere of society in which distributive justice with respect to the allocation of opportunities to learn can have profound and lasting effects on students’ educational outcomes. We frame our study in the distributive justice literature, and define just outcomes specifically from a meritocratic and strict egalitarian perspectives in order to investigate how assignment to academic tracks and the availability of opportunities to learn during high school are associated with students’ academic achievement during college. We examine the role of “just” placement into high school academic tracks, “just” access to high-quality teachers, and “just” assignment of secondary schools’ resources in high school, in relation to college freshmen’s grade point averages (GPA). We utilize longitudinal data from a unique dataset with over 15,000 students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina public secondary schools and then attended North Carolina public universities. Our results suggest that “unjust” assignment of students to certain high schools, access to high-quality teachers, and assignment to learn in specific academic tracks result in long-lasting consequences that are reflected in freshman college GPA. Importantly, findings also show that the direction and magnitude of the relationship between distributional injustice at schools and college performance is moderated by students’ own gender and race. Race and gender interact with the high schools’ institutional contexts operationalized by tracking practices, teacher quality, and by school racial and socioeconomic composition. Results show that similar settings do not affect all students in the same ways.     

Engaging students on the topic of restorative justice and serious offenses

Within contemporary society, there is a prevailing sentiment that our criminal justice system leaves much to be desired in its responses to the offender, the victim, and the community. As a potential answer to these conceded shortcomings, restorative justice has earned significant recognition and consideration. While restorative justice principles and programs have received increasing support, for many individuals this is limited to cases involving relatively ‘minor,’ first time, and/or juvenile offenses. When it comes to situations with more ‘serious’ and violent offenses, acceptance of restorative responses dissipates. Gaining broader acceptance can be particularly challenging with current college students. With many students raised in the ‘get tough on crime’ era, embracing this alternative approach to serious crimes can be a difficult paradigm shift. This article will provide a framework for approaching the feasibility of applying restorative justice with serious offenses in the college course. In addition, suggestions for readings, projects, and assignments that will further assist in effectively engaging students with these issues will be provided.     

‘Fat cat’ lawyers and ‘illegal’ migrants: the impact of intersecting hostilities and toxic narratives on access to justice

ABSTRACT

This article examines how three spheres of hostility intersect to prevent effective access to justice for those living with insecure immigration status. The neoliberal governance model, the barren justice landscape and the hostile environment are supported by the cynical construction of the ‘fat cat’ lawyer and the toxic ‘folk devil’ narrative of the ‘bogus’ asylum seeker. To the extent that the judiciary have frustrated the more obvious, ideologically driven, attempts to restrict access to justice for migrants, the austerity predicated measures pursuant to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) have completely altered the legal landscape. The analysis is informed by the findings of the ‘Legal advice and support for persons with insecure status’ project (hereafter LAPIS) in Nottingham which explores the challenges faced by service providers and the lived experiences of those with insecurity of status. It is clear that access to justice is a passport to the realisation of other rights, yet participants struggled to access a remedy because legal advice is too often out of reach.     

NR Madhava Menon: The guiding light for global clinical legal education

The late NR Madhava Menon, known widely as ‘the father of modern legal education in India’, was also a leading voice for global legal education reform by championing ‘socially relevant legal education’ through clinical legal education throughout the world. This article concentrates on his seminal role in the founding of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE) and the crafting of its mission statement. Drawing on a number of key moments in Dr Menon’s lifelong dedication to the twin causes of legal education and social justice, it highlights how he brought an international perspective to his critical work on legal education reform in India by enlisting international collaborators, how he motivated international colleagues to bring similar reforms to their countries, and how he mentored new generations of legal educators in what has become a true global clinical movement. The article focuses specifically on how the guiding principles of GAJE’s inaugural conference, which Dr Menon co-chaired in 1999, reflect his vision of global clinical legal education that continues to guide GAJE and the global clinical movement today.

     

The Vicious Circles of Habermas’ Cosmopolitics

Habermas’ cosmopolitan project seeks to transform global politics into an emancipatory activity in order to compensate for the disempowering effects of globalization. The project is traced through three vicious circles which stem from Habermas’ commitment to intersubjectivity. Normative politics always raises a vicious circle because politics is only needed to the extent that an issue has become problematized through want of intersubjective agreement. At domestic level Habermas solves this problem by constitutionalizing transcendental presuppositions that political participants cannot avoid making. This fix will not work at the global level because it is pre-political as between human individuals. Habermas therefore premises cosmopolitics on the transformation of nation-states into sites of participatory politics, engagement in which will eventually ignite a global cosmopolitan consciousness. This transformation depends on the constitutionalization of existing UN structures and their enforcement of an undefined and (therefore) ‘uncontroversial’ core of human rights. Unable to ground this project in social practice, Habermas eventually disregards his own lodestar of intersubjectivity based in social practice by relying on the prediscursive concept of human dignity. This move is not merely philosophically inconsistent; it also opens the door to the moralization of politics and the imposition of human rights down the barrel of a gun.     

Teaching restorative justice: developing a restorative andragogy for face-to-face,online and hybrid course modalities

Teaching restorative justice in an academic setting is different from teaching almost any other academic course. Courses taught in the context of academic criminal justice programs tend to reinforce the structural inequalities in society, replicated and reinforced by instructor driven classroom experiences. In contrast, effective teaching of restorative justice should emulate the values of principles of restorative justice in the organization and management of the course. Teachers of restorative justice must ‘walk the talk’ and apply restorative principles and values to the design and delivery of the course itself. A conceptual framework for ‘restorative andragogy’ is developed that blends principles and values of adult learning with those of restorative justice. Four principles of this approach are identified and applied across three instructional modalities – face-to-face, online only, and hybrid courses. This approach provides a theoretically grounded model for effective teaching of restorative justice courses.     

Luhmann: Law,Justice, and Time

Time is central to Luhmann’s writings on social systems. Social systems, as systems of meaning, operate within three dimensions: factual, social and temporal. Each of these dimensions entails selections of actualities from potentialities (or contingencies) within horizons. Whilst the factual dimension involves selections based on distinguishing ‘this’ from ‘something else’, and the social distinguishes between alter and ego (asking with respect to any meaning whether another experiences it as I do), the temporal dimension operates with the primary distinction of before and after. In the temporal dimension, everything is ‘ordered only according to the when and not to the who/what/where/how of experience and action’ (Luhmann in Social systems. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995, p. 78). In this paper, we explore the connection between the temporal dimension of meaning within the legal system and its connection to justice. We begin by setting out succinctly the role played by justice within the legal system, as presented by Luhmann, particularly in his book Law as a social system (2004). From this beginning, we move on to consider the relationship between law, justice and time, taking two examples. The first is the temporality of judicial decisions. The second concerns the relationship between the temporal meaning of law’s own operations, and the presumption of innocence.     

Administrative Justice in Wales

This article examines some of the synergies between Phil Thomas’ work and the authors’ research into administrative justice in Wales. Like him, they have examined the impact of new rights-based legislation on access to justice, and also share with him an interest in connections between politics, social policy, and access to justice. The article argues that Wales is not yet taken seriously as ‘a site in which [administrative] justice is done’, and that there remains an ‘implementation gap’ when it comes to putting innovative social policy into practice. The limited development of an administrative justice culture can hamper the achievement of social and economic justice in Wales; such a culture could be fostered with leadership from the Welsh Government and the Senedd, alongside improved training for administrators, and the potential addition of ‘a just Wales’ to the well-being goals contained in the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015.     

Can restorative justice disrupt the ‘school-to-prison pipeline?’

The ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ now commonly refers to the impact of zero tolerance and other harsh exclusionary discipline policies on school suspensions and expulsions, especially felt among minority students of color in the United States. Abundant evidence now concludes that such students are suspended, expelled, disciplinarily referred and arrested at rates far exceeding either their representation in the population or that of their white peers. Restorative justice practices have emerged as an increasingly popular response to racial disparity in school discipline, supported by research, state and federal governmental initiatives. However, the capacity of restorative justice to limit the school-to-prison pipeline may remain unfulfilled unless it can disrupt current social-organizational structures that maintain racial inequity in institutional structures. This paper considers the effectiveness of restorative justice in schools as an alternative to overly punitive discipline policy and as a strategy for reducing racial disciplinary disparity. It then considers organizational and cultural impediments to implementing restorative justice to overcome racial disciplinary inequity for school-based youth and asserts that restorative justice must strive for more than incremental change inside existing systems.     

Public Health as Social Justice? A Qualitative Study of Public Health Policy-Makers’ Perspectives

Social justice is often described as the ‘foundation of public health.’ Yet, outside of the theoretical literature the polysemous nature of the concept is rarely acknowledged. To complement recent contributions to normative theory specifically motivated by questions of social justice in public health, this study explores public health policy-makers’ perspectives on the meaning and role of social justice in their practice. This study involved twenty qualitative, semi-structured interviews with public health policy-makers recruited from two programmatic areas of public health [chronic disease prevention (CDP) and public health emergency preparedness and response (PHEPR)] within public health organizations in Canada. Participants’ perspectives appeared to be influenced by the perceived goals belonging to the programmatic area of public health in which they practiced. Those involved in PHEPR indicated that justice-based considerations are viewed as a ‘constraint’ on the aims of this area of practice, which are to minimize overall morbidity and mortality, whereas those involved in CDP indicated that justice-based considerations are ‘part and parcel’ of their work, which seeks primarily to address the unique health needs of (and thus, disparities between) population groups. The aims and activities of different programmatic areas of public health may influence the way in which social justice is perceived in practice. More ought to be done (in theory and in practice) to interrogate how the unique contributions that individual programmatic areas of public health can and should cohere in order to realize the broader aim that public health has as an institution to promote social justice.

     

(Un)veiling equity: a critical analysis of the insider and outsider roles of a Muslim female Shi’i educator in academy

This is a critical personal narrative of a Canadian Middle-Eastern Muslim female Shi’i educator’s experiences in a Western academy. The different cultural and religious backgrounds that shape a Muslim woman’s academic work and her understanding of social justice are described. Specifically, the author describes religio-historical figures and the counter-narratives of women of color in the author’s life responsible for shaping her appreciation of the importance of engaging in social justice and equity. The subjectivity in this work is manifested as an alignment with her religious beliefs and doctrine that draws from a counter-narrative (i.e. the Shi’i narrative of Karbala and, more broadly, the marginalized and dissenting ideological position of Shi’ is in relation to global Islam). Her upbringing with and introduction to Shi’i rituals, empower her understanding towards issues related to justice, equal rights, and loyalty. Throughout her narrative, the author utilizes the role of a researcher as an insider and outsider based on religious and feminist approaches. Three significant themes are noted: (a) the critical role of spirituality as a powerful catalyst and feminist for transformative change; (b) the role of reflexive skills and self-criticism as a means to balance religious and academic identities; and (c) the import role of ‘border-crossers’ in negotiating and connecting between religious and academic worlds. Insights about the experiences associated with minority Shi’i Muslim female graduate educators and the importance of being critically reflective when working towards social justice and equity are provided.     

‘Burqa Avenger’: Law and Religious Practices in Secular Space

The current debate over the hijab is often understood through the lens of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between a tolerant ‘secular’ ‘West’ and a chauvinist ‘religious’ ‘East’. The article argues that this polarization is the result of a specific secular semiotic understanding of religion and religious practices which is nowadays embedded in western law. In my analysis, secular’s normative assumptions, played around the control of women’s bodies and the definition of religious symbols in the public sphere, work as a marker of ‘citizenship’ and ‘racialized religious belonging’. Through women’s bodies, western/secular law creates a link between gender, religion, ethnicity and belonging which forms a specific law and religious subject. Thus, secularism emerges not as the separation between private and public, state and religion, but as the reconfiguration of religious practices and sensitivities in the public secular space through the control of the visible.