Consensus, compromise, justice and legitimacy

Justice , Trust and Institutional Legitimacy

This paper summarising ‘procedural justice’ approaches to policing, contrasting these to the more politically dominant discourse about policing as crime control. It argues that public trust in policing is needed partly because this may result in public cooperation with justice, but more importantly because public trust in justice builds institutional legitimacy and thus public compliance with t...

Compromise as Precise Justice

Legitimacy and Justice in Republican Perspective

Let justice be a feature of the social order imposed by a state and legitimacy a feature of how it is imposed: one that makes the imposition acceptable. This article argues that, so understood, legitimacy is quite a distinct concern from justice; that the core concern is with showing how state coercion is consistent with people’s being free citizens; that this does not require showing that the ...

Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law

Legal authorities gain when they receive deference and cooperation from the public. Considerable vidence suggests that the key factor shaping public behavior is the fairness of the processes legal authorities use when dealing with members of the public. This reaction occurs both during personal experiences with legal authorities and when community residents are making general evaluations of the...

Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: The Benefits of Self-Regulation

In this lecture I argue for the value of a self-regulatory approach to law and criminal justice. I do so by first describing and critiquing the dominant approach to regulation in use today: deterrence. I suggest that in practice this model is costly and minimally effective in securing compliance with the law and motivating the acceptance of decisions made by police officers and judges. I then o...