Procedural Fairness in the News

Recent essays and articles about procedural fairness:

“First Person: Salinas could’ve been Ferguson. Here’s why it wasn’t.” Lydia DePillis, Wash. Post, Aug. 22, 2014.

“Procedural Justice: Public Perception of Court and Legal System Legitimacy” Riley Combelic, IAALS Online, July 7, 2014.

“Justice Sotomayor and the Jurisprudence of Procedural Justice” Professor Tracy Meares and Professor Tom Tyler, Yale Law Journal Forum, March 24, 2014

“The Procedural Fairness Movement Comes of Age” Judge Steve Leben, Future Trends in State Courts, 2014.

“Perceptions Matter: A Roadmap to Reducing Crime” Greg Berman, Huffington Post Blog, November 12, 2013.

“The Case for Procedural Justice: Fairness as a Crime Prevention Tool” Emily Gold and Melissa Bradley, Community Policing Dispatch, September 2013.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Events

Papers__________________________________________________________________________________________

We are happy to announce the release of the following papers in conjunction with our ongoing efforts to document procedural fairness in U.S. courts:

We have published, on our website, a paper Steve Leben presented to the September 2011 Utah state judicial conference, Considering Procedural-Fairness Concepts in the Courts of Utah. Utah has a formal program for publicly evaluating judicial performance, and those evaluations explicitly review adherence to procedural-fairness principles. The paper provides a good overview of procedural-fairness concepts and how they may be used to evaluate judicial performance.

Why do People Comply with the Law? Legitimacy and the Influence of Legal Institutions, by Jonathan Jackson et al., extends professor Tom Tyler’s model of procedural justice to present a concept of legitimacy that is based on justification of power. Based on data from England and Wales, the authors find that people are more likely to accept police behavior when they believe that that they have a “shared moral purpose” with the action.

Policing and Social Identity: Procedural Justice, Inclusion, and Cooperationbetween Police and Public, by Ben Bradford, is a 2012 Oxford working paper.  Using data from young Londoners, this paper explores the relationship between procedural fairness, social identity, and legitimacy. Among citizens of a non-UK country, fairness of police actions had a strong relationship with social identity, suggesting that “police activity is a particularly important factor in promoting social identities among individuals who feel a more complicated sense of belonging.” In turn, a sense of belonging “can be linked to cooperation.” This relationship between social identity and procedural fairness was weaker with citizens of the UK; however, a link between fairness and legitimacy was observed throughout both groups.