Brings together internationally renowned scholars from a range of disciplines, including criminology, international relations, sociology and political science, to examine the meaning of legitimacy and the implications for its future empirical analysis in the context of criminal justice.

This book aims to explore a number of connected themes relating to compliance, legitimacy and trust in different areas of criminal justice and socio-legal regulation.

The police and the courts depend on the cooperation of communities to keep order. But large numbers of urban poor distrust law enforcement officials. Legitimacy and Criminal Justice explores the reasons that legal authorities are or are not seen as legitimate and trustworthy by many citizens. Legitimacy and Criminal Justice is the first study of the perceived legitimacy of legal institutions outside the U.S. The authors investigate relations between courts, the police, and communities in the U.K., Western Europe, South Africa, Slovenia, South America, and Mexico, demonstrating the importance of social context in shaping those relations. Gorazd Meško and Goran Klemencic examine Slovenia's adoption of Western-style "community policing" during its transition to democracy. In the context of Slovenia's recent Communist past—when "community policing" entailed omnipresent social and political control—citizens regarded these efforts with great suspicion, and offered little cooperation to the police. When states fail to control crime, informal methods of law can gain legitimacy. Jennifer Johnson discusses an extra-legal policing system carried out by farmers in Guerrero, Mexico—complete with sentencing guidelines and initiatives to reintegrate offenders into the community. Feeling that federal authorities were not prosecuting the crimes that plagued their province, the citizens of Guerrero strongly supported this extra-legal arrangement, and engaged in massive protests when the central government tried to suppress it. Several of the authors examine how the perceived legitimacy of the police and courts varies across social groups. Graziella Da Silva, Ignacio Cano, and Hugo Frühling show that attitudes toward the police vary greatly across social classes in harshly unequal societies like Brazil and Chile. And many of the authors find that ethnic minorities often display greater distrust toward the police, and perceive themselves to be targets of police discrimination. Indeed, Hans-Jöerg Albrecht finds evidence of bias in arrests of the foreign born in Germany, which has fueled discontent among Berlin's Turkish youth. Sophie Body-Gendrot points out that mutual hostility between police and minority communities can lead to large-scale violence, as the Parisian banlieu riots underscored. The case studies presented in this important new book show that fostering cooperation between law enforcement and communities requires the former to pay careful attention to the needs and attitudes of the latter. Forging a new field of comparative research, Legitimacy and Criminal Justice brings to light many of the reasons the law's representatives succeed—or fail—in winning citizens' hearts and minds. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

The book explores police legitimacy and crime control, with a focus on the European region. Using comparative case studies, the contributions to this timely volume examine the effects of a transition to democracy on policing, public attitudes towards police legitimacy, and the ways in which perceptions of police legitimacy relate to compliance with the law. Following these case studies, the authors provide recommendations for improving police legitimacy and controlling crime, in these particular sociopolitical environments, where the police are often associated with previous military or paramilitary roles. The techniques used by these researchers may be applied to studies for policing in other regions, with potential applications within Europe and beyond. Chapters present topical issues of crime, crime control and human emotions regarding crime, criminals, law enforcement and punishment in contemporary societies. This book will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, as well as political science and public policy. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in procedural justice and legitimacy, encounters between citizens and the state, the effectiveness of governmental institutions, and democratic development. It stands alone in its broad, cross-national contributions to understanding these issues. -Wesley G. Skogan, PhD, Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA

This volume presents an overview of the principal features of the legacy of International Tribunals and an assessment of their impact on the International Criminal Court and on the review process of the Rome Statute. It illustrates the foundation of a system of international criminal law and justice through the case-law and practices of the UN ad hoc tribunals and other internationally assisted tribunals and courts. These examples provide advice for possible future developments in international criminal procedure and law, with particular reference to their impact on the ICC and on national jurisdictions. The review process of the Rome Statute is approached as a step of a review process to provide a perspective of the developments in the field since the Statute’s adoption in 1998.

This brief focuses on the “doing” of procedural justice: what the police can do to implement the principles of procedural justice, and how their actions can improve citizen perceptions of police legitimacy. Drawing on research from Australia (Mazerolle et al), the UK (Stanko, Bradford, Jackson etc al), the US (Tyler, Reisig, Weisburd), Israel (Jonathon-Zamir et al), Trinidad & Tobago (Kochel et al) and Ghana (Tankebe), the authors examine the practical ways that the police can approach engagement with citizens across a range of different types of interventions to embrace the principles of procedural justice, including: · problem-oriented policing · patrol · restorative justice · reassurance policing · and community policing. Through these examples, the authors also examine some of the barriers for implementing procedurally just ways of interacting with citizens, and offer practical suggestions for reform. This work will be of interest for researchers in criminology and criminal justice focused on policing as well as policymakers.

Whereas previous studies of legitimacy and trust have mostly dealt with procedural justice and the police, this book focuses on other crucial understudied aspects of legitimacy within criminal law, policy and criminal justice. The chapters expand and develop current criminological, legal and socio-legal research by addressing conceptions of legitimacy linked to criminal law norms, criminalisation and sanctioning; by examining EU legal and policy aspects of the phenomenon; and by exploring some specific court-related issues of legitimacy and trust, hitherto neglected. With contributions from across the EU, this interdisciplinary collection presents a valuable discussion on the importance of trust in legal institutions of modern democracies and suggests ideas for future research in this area to challenge ways of thinking about legitimacy.