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Findings from system justification theory suggest that procedural justice information processing may be subject to motivational influences, and therefore may not always be accurate. In particular, experiencing procedural injustice may pose a threat to beliefs about the legitimacy and benevolence of the groups and systems a person inhabits and motivate a more positive reinterpretation of the experience in line with one's beliefs. This hypothesis was tested among 997 respondents to a survey concerning personal interactions with legal authorities. Results indicate that more conservative respondents, who exhibit a stronger motivation to justify the system compared with more liberal respondents, reported greater overall satisfaction with the authority figure, while adjusting for outcome favorability, and greater overall decision acceptance. In addition, more conservative respondents were less sensitive to decreases in procedural justice and showed a slower decrease in evaluations of the authority in response to experiencing greater injustice, compared to more liberal respondents. Implications for legitimacy of authorities and systems are discussed.

This chapter examines the idea of justice from a self-control perspective. It argues that justice involves socially shared rules whose function is to facilitate people's efforts to manage social interactions. Because of the benefits of social interactions, people want to live in social groups and cooperate with others. However, doing so requires them to recognize what constitutes a reasonable balance between doing what benefits them and doing what benefits others. Rules of social justice define that reasonable balance and, in so doing, make social life more viable. This is directly true with principles of distributive justice, which indicate who should receive what. It is indirectly true of principles of procedural justice, which define how authorities should decide who should receive what. In both cases, reliance on justice makes the functioning of relationships and groups more efficient and effective.

This chapter discusses procedural justice in different areas, focusing on two main themes: procedural justice’ contribution to system stability and people's views about the natural of procedural justice. It explores evidence suggesting that attitudes towards procedural justice are able to bridge the divides between diverse groups in contemporary pluralistic societies.

This chapter presents a framework for reconceptualizing due process in juvenile justice with the ultimate aim of striking an optimal balance between fairness, accuracy, and efficiency in handling delinquency cases. The first part recaps the procedural history of the juvenile court. Its primary message is that the Supreme Court's procedural reform of the juvenile justice system was based on the Due Process Clause and general principles of fundamental fairness, which leaves the door open to flexible approaches to juvenile justice procedure. The second part then plumbs developments in the broader constitutional jurisprudence of procedure, particularly in the administrative and civil law arenas, which enthusiastically endorse a flexible view of due process. With the legal groundwork laid for the proposition that juvenile justice procedure can be rethought, the third part summarizes research on “procedural justice,” which suggests that the adversarial model of procedure is not necessarily the most “just” model, whether viewed from a subjective or objective perspective. The chapter closes with a discussion of the implications of this research, and a proposal that due process in juvenile justice be reconceptualized in a way that allows empirical research and a performance-based management system to identify those procedures that best promote fairness, accuracy, and efficiency.

Woods's chapter focuses primarily on procedural justice within the international financial institutions. She argues that the procedures adopted by these institutions are central to the debate about global economic justice, and thus it is essential to explore how these bodies make decisions and implement them. Her conclusions suggest that, notwithstanding recent and important reforms, the institutions still suffer from weaknesses in representation and accountability. Unless these bodies attend to these deficiencies, the range and scope of their activities should be circumscribed.

This chapter undertakes a critique of the account of formal justice propounded by David Lyons. On the one hand, the chapter agrees with Lyons that the mere status of norms as laws does not confer any degree of moral legitimacy on officials’ enforcement of those norms. On the other hand, the chapter departs from Lyons by accepting that the strict application of the law by officials does amount to formal justice. Precisely because the achievement of formal justice in the administration of law by officials is not perforce conducive (and is frequently inimical) to the substantive justice of their law-administering activities, the equation between formal justice and the strict effecutation of applicable legal mandates is fully consistent with the separability of law and morality.

Using case studies focusing on Appalachian coal and California farmland, the chapter argues that ordinary people typically have unequal access to natural resources like land. A major reason for this unequal access is the power of agribusiness and the corporate control of coal and other resources. It also shows that Appalachia is, in many ways, a region victimized by colonialism, even though it is within the U.S. Analyzing the concepts of end‐state justice and procedural justice, it shows that the arguments of Nozick, often used to justify environmental injustice in cases like Appalachia, are flawed. It also argues that a correct understanding of property rights, as explained in John Locke and John Rawls, can support this chapter's appeal for equal access to natural resources.

This chapter examines the stages of development of administrative law in Great Britain during the twentieth century, describing the different attitudes towards the exercise of state power and its legal control over the century. It explains that the century began with a concern for procedural justice and a particular concept of the rule of law, and ended with judicial constraints upon both the procedures and the substance of official decisions, justified by constitutional rights.

This chapter explores what people who view themselves as victims of war crimes and crimes of humanity and who will never see firsthand the inside of the ICTY courtroom think about the justice delivered by the ICTY. It focuses on their views about distributive and procedural justice, and studies the correlates of their perceptions of ICTY fairness. It examines basic propositions of the procedural justice theory in a new and novel setting (a transnational court), with new types of respondents (victims directly affected by the war, but not able to participate in the proceedings) and very serious crimes (i.e., war crimes, crimes against humanity).

This chapter counters long-standing social perspectives of police behavior by arguing that their inputs are inadequate in capturing the street-level mechanisms by which individuals choose to comply with the law, cooperate with the police, and support the empowerment of police to use discretion. It then points to the influence of perceived procedural justice in conditioning police legitimacy, and argues that according to the procedural justice model of policing the police can build general legitimacy among the public by treating people justly during personal encounters. This is based upon two arguments. The first is that people evaluate personal experiences with the police by considering the fairness of police procedures. Second, this means that by using fair procedures the police can increase their legitimacy. To test this, the chapter analyzes responses to a panel study on New York City residents that tap both the constructs and the characteristics of police legitimacy and cooperation.

Adjudication is the effort to resolve a dispute by determining, amid the clamour of rival claims, what is just. This chapter argues that the adjudicative question is always of this form: ‘In the case now being considered, what is due to whom?’ In adjudication, it is sometimes possible to discover what is intrinsically and in that sense naturally just, but sometimes what is just must be established by convention. The chapter also discusses evidence and impartiality and argues that audi alteram partem and nemo iudex in causa sua are intrinsic to the nature of adjudicative investigation. An interpretation is a text that expresses the interpreter's understanding of another text and the chapter addresses the processes of interpretation and reasonable judgement, which is not infallibility. The chapter brings together various aspects of the discussion by analysing the definition of a ‘refugee’ under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.

This chapter sets some parameters for the discussion that follows. It asks what people are doing when they talk about justice, especially criminal justice, and examines theories of justice and the significance of the related concepts of the rule of law, fairness, procedural justice and the legitimacy of the authority of the state. The chapter continues with a discussion of the — perhaps changing — relationship between the state and the citizen, and the implications of treating criminal justice as a ‘system’, to be managed as if it were a ‘business’. It concludes with some reflections on the language in which public discussion of criminal justice often takes place. The theme that emerges from the chapter is that ‘justice’ cannot be equated with political or managerial objectives such as efficiency or effectiveness, or merely with measurable outcomes in terms of reductions in crime and reoffending or increases in public confidence.

The 1970s saw a wave of attacks on utilitarianism and consequentialism, favouring theories of good government based on contract, whereby what was good followed from what was right, rather than vice versa. There was emphasis on social and distributive justice, seen largely in terms of equality of resources somehow defined, rather than welfare. The various meanings of justice are discussed, and the theories of two leaders of this contractarian movement, namely John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, are found to be flawed. There are serious difficulties with the measurement of equality (of anything). For this and other reasons, the concept of equality is not an acceptable unifying social end.

This chapter presents findings from a large-scale empirical test of procedural justice theory, which we (and colleagues) designed using the fifth European Social Survey. The chapter first of all locates concerns about institutional legitimacy within a broader framework of ‘compliance theories’. It then sets out its definitional stall in an attempt to clarify what is meant by the ‘slippery’ concept of legitimacy and how the term is used in different contexts. Then, in testing various hypotheses on procedural justice, the chapter employs a tripartite definition of empirical (i.e. perceived) legitimacy. The chapter defines empirical legitimacy as the recognition and justification of the right to exercise power and influence, with influence mostly of the normative (rather than instrumental) variety, and importantly our tripartite notions of consent, moral alignment and legality accord with some well-established social psychological mechanisms of identification and internalisation.

In Chapter 4, political scientist Margaret Levi, social psychologist Tom Tyler, and sociologist Audrey Sacks, relying on two datasets (one from the United States and one from sub-Saharan Africa), contend that two factors affect individuals' compliance with law. First, voluntary compliance with the law is influenced by individuals' views of the government's legitimacy. Second, individuals' conception of legitimacy depends significantly on the government's trustworthiness (including its perceived competence) and its commitment to procedural justice.

This chapter explores the principal drawbacks which can attach to decision-making by lot. While the disadvantages of deciding by lot are numerous, they can be categorized in terms of four themes: lotteries are blind, are constructed, create uncertainty, and eschew reason. Although the principal disadvantages of randomization provide the framework for discussion, the lottery decision is not presented in a wholly, or even in a particularly, unfavourable light. Just as the advantages of randomized social decision-making tend to be subject to qualification, an examination of the disadvantages of such decision-making often enables us to appreciate more fully the favourable attributes of lotteries. The main argument is that the lottery may provide valuable insights into the nature of, and our assumptions concerning, legal decision-making precisely because we generally consider the notion of a randomized legal decision to be invidious. Non-weighted lottery decisions may offend against commonplace conceptions of justice and adversely affect people's incentives. This chapter also discusses the use of lotteries in child custody adjudication and procedural justice.