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.     

Procedural justice in mental health court: an investigation of the relation of perception of procedural justice to non-adherence and termination

Mental health courts (MHCs) operate on the principles of procedural justice (PJ). PJ highlights the importance of process over outcomes in encounters with authority. Subjective perceptions of having voice, being heard by decision-makers, and being treated with respect and concern by figures of authority are influential in assessment of fairness and in cooperation with decisions, regardless of favorability of the outcome. In this paper, we investigate MHC participant perception of PJ in interactions with MHC staff and the association between perceptions and recidivism (i.e. time in jail, new arrests, and probation violations), treatment adherence, and MHC termination. Participants from two MHC programs (n?=?80) took part in this study. Results suggest that perception of PJ during interactions with the entire MHC team is significantly associated with program termination, but not with participant behaviors during MHC. Implications for MHC practitioners and researchers are discussed.     

Frustration effects in procedural justice research: The case of drug-testing legislation

A scenario methodology was used to investigate reactions to negative outcomes resulting from drug-testing procedures. The drug-testing procedures reflected variations in State law governing the use of drug tests in employee selection. Results suggest that individuals responded most negatively to negative outcomes resulting from the legally mandated procedures. Results are discussed as an example of the frustration effect observed in the procedural justice literature. Frustration effects were most severe for individuals who were most certain, based on personal knowledge, that the drug test results were inaccurate.     

Context effects on procedural justice: Effects of interrelatedness,trust, and penalty on procedural preferences

The relationship of context to procedural preferences was studied by examining the effects of interrelatedness, trust, and penalty on preferences for adversary and inquisitorial hearing procedures. Subjects imagined themselves members of different communities and were led to believe that they had been accused of committing an offense of which they knew they were innocent. Interrelatedness, trust, and penalty interacted to affect subjects' ratings of both hearing procedures. Subjects in highly trusting settings (i) preferred the inquisitorial procedure more than those in nontrusting settings and (ii) preferred the adversary procedure less than their nontrusting counterparts. A penalty effect was also found. As penalty increased, subjects increased in their preference for the adversary procedure and decreased in their preference for the inquisitorial procedure, but only in noninterrelated communities. The implications for prior research and for the role of interrelatedness in procedural choice are discussed.     

Impact of procedural factors on perceived justice in divorce settlements

We used a decision-making conceptual framework from family resource management combined with procedural justice frameworks from social psychology to (i) articulate the elements and rules of procedural fairness, (ii) develop a theoretical organization and code to include procedural fairness principles as applied to legal decision processes in divorce, and (iii) describe the perceptions of divorcing parties about the violations of procedural fairness principles in their own divorce process. Procedural fairness principles included accuracy, consistency, ethicality, bias suppression, correctability, and representativeness. Results of qualitative data analyses were consistent with experimental studies in that divorced people were concerned with fair procedures and particularly with violations of the principles of ethicality, consistency, accuracy, and representativeness.     

The role of procedural and distributive justice in organizational behavior

To investigate the relationship between fairness and organizational outcomes, the present study examined the survey responses of government employees at six Federal installations. Indices of procedural and distributive fairness were factor-analytically derived. Multiple regression analyses indicated that both the procedural measures and the distributive measures were significantly related to measures of job satisfaction, evaluation of supervisor, conflict/harmony, trust in management, and turnover intention. Procedural fairness accounted for significantly more variance than distributive fairness in each of these criterion measures, except for turnover intention. These findings are related to conceptual and methodological issues concerning procedural fairness and organizational behavior.     

Perspective and procedural justice: Attorney and litigant evaluations of court procedures

A comparison of the procedural justice judgments of attorneys and those of lay people judging the same procedures offers an opportunity to generate new information on what factors affect judgments of fairness. In a survey of reactions to conventional and innovative procedures in a United States district court, attorneys and lay people involved in tort and contract cases were asked to judge the overall fairness of court procedures and the fairness of specific procedures used in arbitration hearings. The respondents were also asked for their judgments concerning the favorability of the procedure's outcome, the opportunity to have the case heard and decided by an impartial third party, and their side's control over what happened in the case, all of which are factors found in previous studies to affect procedural fairness judgments. The results showed that, while attorneys gave higher overall fairness ratings than did litigants, the difference was not affected by the procedure assigned to the case. In addition, attorneys and litigants appeared to use the same standards to evaluate the fairness of procedures, although they disagreed about where the procedures they experienced fell on these dimensions. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

What is procedural justice: Criteria used by Dutch victims to assess the fairness of criminal justice procedures

The study examines the meaning of procedural justice to Dutch victims of crime. Using victimological research and the group-value or relational model or procedural justice developed by Lind and Tyler, a model for procedural justice judgments is developed and tested using the structural equation model. Data used for the analysis consist of 221 interviews with victims regarding their experience with the public prosecution. Although the emerging model differs from that of Lind and Tyler, results support Lind and Tyler's assertion that procedural justice judgments are normative and not instrumental. Victims are particularly concerned about being treated with dignity and respect and are not interested in influencing the outcome of their case.     

Beyond normative constraints: Declining institutionalism and the emergence of substantive and procedural justice

Popular notions of what it means to be put on trial invariably generate thoughts of the adversarial criminal trial, most often before a judge and jury. However, the criminal trial as the site for the testing of evidence of wrongdoing via a model of proof that proceeds according to prescribed processes in a normative institutional milieu is in decline. Controversially, this decline has been met with resistance from the legal profession, academics, policy makers and other stakeholders seeking to preserve the due process model that defines the criminal trial as an adversarial exchange between state and defendant. While the due process model continues to dominate as popular conceptualisation, the twenty-first century criminal trial has changed to such an extent that it is no longer seen as the quintessential form for the meting out of procedural fairness and testing of state's evidence, that emerged toward the end of the seventeenth century. Rather, the rise of control orders, modifications to the law of evidence, and the right of the accused to confront their accuser, together with the inclusion of non-traditional agents of justice, specifically victims and the community, has brought forward an era of substantive and procedural justice that lies beyond the normative constraints of the criminal trial. Robed counsel and bewigged judges beware; the advent of substantive and procedural justice has allowed for greater innovation transgressing the orthodoxies of criminal law in common law systems of justice. This paper will consider the virtues of the introduction of a transgressive criminal procedure.     

Promoting a culture of fairness: police training,procedural justice,and compliance

Objectives

Academics and practitioners alike are concerned about the potential “double-edged sword” of procedural justice. In the organizational context, procedural justice is expected to increase compliance with supervisors. However, blind, unthinking, or “hard” compliance with supervisors, may lead to anti-organizational behavior and misconduct. The present study examines the moderating effect of a police recruit cultural training program on the relationship between procedural justice and compliance with police supervisors. We expect that providing cultural training will moderate the relationship between procedural justice and “hard” compliance.

Methods

Participants were police recruits at the Queensland Police Academy who were randomly assigned to an experimental (Voice 4 Values) or control condition (business-as-usual training) upon entry into the academy. Recruits in both groups were surveyed pre- and post- training to capture perceptions of procedural justice and compliance with supervisors.

Results

Results suggest that procedural justice mattered less for predicting “hard” or unthinking compliance among the recruits who received the Voice 4 Values cultural training package, compared to those who did not receive the training.

Conclusions

We conclude that while procedural justice may be of interest to policing organizations, it is important that it is not used as a tool to encourage unthinking compliance. We find cultural training reduces the effect of procedural justice on unthinking or “hard” compliance.

     

The role of procedural justice in the allocation of limited resources: A West German perspective

Following the experimental design used by Barrett-Howard and Tyler (1986), this study examines the importance given by West German university students to procedural and distributive justice allocation decision making. After reading one of eight scenarios in which there was a limited resource to be allocated, the subjects answered questions concerning the importance and meaning of justice. For the most part, the results correspond to previous U.S. findings of the importance of procedural justice and its definition across various allocation settings. However, the West German students placed greater importance on having mechanisms for correcting inadequate decisions than did their American counterparts. Beyond the design of the initial U.S. study, however, the West German students were asked in an open-ended format to discuss their concerns in making the allocation decision. Nearly half of the unprompted responses centered around justice issues.     

Distributive and procedural justice in interpersonal and intergroup situations: Issues,solutions, and extensions

This paper addresses theoretical issues relating to distributive and procedural justice. Specifically, comparisons are made between interpersonal and intergroup situations. Within the realm of distributive justice, two reinterpretations of the ingroup allocation bias are offered. One reinterpretation states that people show this bias to prevent being exploited by the outgroup. The other reinterpretation states that the bias can be regarded as a measure of the perceived worth of the ingroup in relation to the outgroup. The related issue of the procedure used for allocating resources is addressed by extending Tyler and Lind's (1992) Relational Model of Authority to all ingroup members in both interpersonal and intergroup situations. Reinterpretations and extensions offered in this paper lead to new theoretical insights and to several suggestions and predictions for future empirical research.     

Socrates behind bars: a report on an experimental course on justice and philosophy

This paper describes a particular educational experience: a course that took place in prison involving law students and inmates. One of the co-authors was the leading instructor in the course, whereas the other played an active role during its design and implementation. Social prejudices and taboos on crime, criminals and prisons offer a simplistic, biased and altogether negative image of penal institutions and those involved in them. This picture pervades society in general, and the legal professions in particular. The course described in this paper is aimed at bridging the gap between inmates and future lawyers by bringing them together into the same classroom to think and reflect collectively. The method used was the Socratic dialogue, in which the professor acted as a “spiritual midwife” encouraging dialogue and debate around fundamental issues such as truth, fear, happiness, respect, responsibility, justice, and so on. During each session, participants explored these concepts in depth, and had the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the other’s point of view. The ultimate aim was that upon completing this course both groups could have a better understanding of each other’s realities. This paper is based on the personal accounts of the participants in the course, including professors and students (both law students and inmates). The methodology is qualitative and phenomenological, and its value lies in the singularity of the experience. Drawing on the theory of justice of Amartya Sen, we identify this course as a non-transcendentalist and non-institutionalist approach to justice, exploring the role that emotions play in it. In the conclusions we express our belief that by thinking together and trusting each other students and inmates can open themselves to a logic of cooperation that connects both with a broader sense of justice and the enhancement of democracy.     

Opening a window into police internal affairs: Impact of procedural justice reform on third-party attitudes

The study explores the impact of a procedural innovation on justice judgments made by third party observers. The innovation involved the establishment of a review panel with civilian participants to monitor a police department's investigation of allegations of misconduct against its officers. The study distinguishes the impact on racial minority observers from that on racial majority observers. Data suggest that the innovation had a positive, though differing, impact on the justice judgments of both minority and majority observers.     

Mandatory,fast, and fair: Case outcomes and procedural justice in a family drug court

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Problem-solving courts are traditionally voluntary in nature to promote procedural justice and to advance therapeutic jurisprudence. The Family Treatment Drug...     

Procedural justice in managerial selection: Identification of fairness determinants and associations of fairness perceptions

The study examined procedural fairness in managerial selection practices. A sample of professional managers were asked to make first, fairness judgments about managerial selection procedures in general; and second, specific fairness judgments based on their own previous experiences in applying for such positions. Using the general fairness ratings, the determinants of procedural fairness in selection were identified by the factor analysis technique. Five procedural factors (three process and two decision factors) accounted for 57.4% of the total variance. The factor scores derived from fairness ratings of specific selection procedures were then correlated with ratings of candidates' later organizational commitment, work satisfaction, and perceptions of organizational effectiveness. Results showed that process factors were significantly associated with candidate variables but decision factors were not. The findings were discussed in the context of current procedural justice theories.     

Criminal defendants' satisfaction with lawyers: perceptions of procedural fairness and effort of the lawyer

At present, procedural justice theory has predominantly been used to explain defendants' satisfaction with the police, courts and prisons. It is unclear to what extent this theory is also applicable to lawyers. This study investigates to what extent (1) criminal defendants are satisfied with their lawyers and (2) procedural fairness characteristics and the effort of the lawyer are related to defendants' satisfaction with their lawyers. Data from the Prison Project were used: a large-scale research project among Dutch criminal defendants (N = 1479). Results suggest that generally, Dutch defendants are very satisfied with their lawyers. Variation in defendants' satisfaction with their lawyers can be attributed for a substantial part to procedural fairness characteristics.     

An experimental investigation of procedural issues in complex tort trials

An investigation of the impact of innovations in civil trial procedure manipulated trial structure (unitary vs. separated trial issues), order of decisions (liability or causation first), and number of decisions made (one to four) in a simulated toxic tort trial. Juries gave verdicts and damage awards. Recordings were made of the juries' deliberations. The results showed significantly more verdicts in favor of the plaintiffs in unitary trials (causation, liability, and damages heard together) as opposed to separated trials. However, average damage awards were higher in the separated than in the unitary trial conditions. Juries assigned more responsibility to the defendant in the unitary trial. Juries also used the totality of the evidence to decide all issues, especially general causation, which contained the most ambiguous testimony. The performance of these simulated juries in complex litigation was discussed in terms of group and individual cognitive factors.