This chapter addresses the widespread perception that rural politics are characterized by irrational antigovernment sentiment, right-wing conspiracy theories, and other ideological drivers. This perception includes the stereotype that rural residents are generally conservatives who “vote against their interests” when liberal policies might appear to help their communities more. The chapter argues that rural views on government are just as often rational reactions to the unique impacts of law, regulation, and government in rural communities. Drawing on legitimacy theory, the chapter argues that rural grievances toward the federal regulatory state specifically reflect predictable concerns relating to procedural justice, substantive outcomes, and a sense that agencies prioritize concerns other than rural residents’ concerns. Although rural views vary, and intersect with other identities such as race, diverse rural populations exhibit common concerns about agencies posing threats to livelihoods and failing to offer protection from environmental threats. The chapter argues that overlap between subjective rural sentiments and objective structural features of the regulatory state lend credence to rural views as not irrational. Barriers to public participation in agency rulemaking, regulatory cost–benefit analysis, and implementation of the Endangered Species Act all illustrate instances of the regulatory state often failing to take meaningful rural concerns seriously.

Informal institutions in global governance are generally expected to favor powerful states. According to conventional arguments, procedural justice is best secured through formal institutional rules that constrain power, while informal institutions reinforce power asymmetries. This chapter revisits this position and asks, how and under what conditions can informal institutions enhance the voice and influence of less powerful or marginalized actors in global governance? The chapter argues that while informal institutions are useful to powerful states because they remove constraints to individual action, they can also be useful to less powerful states to the extent that they positively support action through social-integrative effects. Specifically, interactions within informal groups generate two types of social effects – capacity-building and coalition-building – that can enhance the voice of developing countries and increase their control over collective decisions. The chapter illustrates the arguments by profiling informal groups in the global governance of trade and finance.

Chapter 7 is the conclusion and consolidates ideas and findings. This chapter calls for and reflects on the possibility of a more transparent and fair anti-dumping system for all WTO members achieved by promoting procedural justice. It also considers the significance of the findings of the book for international trade law discourse more generally by relating them to contemporary trade issues such as the US–China trade war, Brexit, the WTO crisis and mega free trade agreements.

At the core of any legal decision is an assumption that the decision will be “fair,” yet this is an elusive term. A close study of cases involving criminal defendants with mental disabilities shows that many (perhaps most) of the decisions involving this cohort are not “fair” in the contexts of due process and justice. If legal decisions reflect principles such as procedural justice, restorative justice, and therapeutic jurisprudence, the chances of such fairness will be significantly enhanced. This chapter explains why this goal of fairness, in the context of these cases, can never be met absent a consideration of the virulence of sanism and pretextuality, along with the misuse of heuristics and false “ordinary common sense.” These factors enable much of society to ignore gray areas of human behavior, and predispose fact-finders to endorse beliefs in accord with their prior experiences.

Health-care systems within most countries are resource-limited – budgets are finite and not every service one would like to provide can be funded. In publicly funded health systems, those responsible for procuring health-care need to be able to explain how taxpayers’ money has been spent. Decisions are made at both individual patient and population levels. At an individual level, the decision might be: which statin should this patient get a prescription for to lower her blood cholesterol? At a population level, the decision might be: will a health and social care commissioning organization purchase a heart-failure specialist nurse or an additional sexual health clinic?

This chapter focuses on how such decisions are made and considers a framework for priority setting, a discussion of what factors should be taken into account when comparing options, a consideration of basic health economic concepts, and an overview of ethical principles which influence decisions.

This chapter explores private institutions that adjudicate criminal disputes, from professional organizations to universities to religious organizations. These institutions can choose the level of due process they want to follow, although universities are bound by Title IX requirements and face some constitutional restrictins. The institutions also follow their own distinctive interests in meting out punishment if they adjudicate the accused as guilty. Their procedures often provide a level of procedural justice and restorative justice beyond what the public criminal justice system provides.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of private criminal settlements, in which the alleged criminal gives the victim of the crime some consideration in exchange for keeping the incident out of the public criminal justice system. These agreements may occur between two private individuals who have (and wish to maintain) a preexisting relationship, such as when the victim and the perpetrator are family members. They may involve a corporate client of a private police officer who decides that referring the case to the public criminal justice system is too expensive and time consuming. The witness may not even be the victim of the crime; the witness could be a third party who either accidentally discovered evidence of the crime or actively sought the information in order to extract a payment from the perpetrator. The chapter sets out the motivations that lead individuals to enter these agreements and argues that these agreements offer benefits to society that outweight their costs. It also compares these agreements to public plea bargains, comparing the arguments for and against plea bargains with the arguments for and against private criminal settlements.

IOM wields power over individuals and is capable of violating their rights, for instance when it contributes to migrant detention operations or when it engages in migrant returns that are ‘voluntary under compulsion’. This chapter assesses IOM’s legal human rights accountability in three steps. First, IOM’s human rights obligations are identified. While there has been much debate about their proper source, there is today little doubt that organizations such as IOM as have at least a core bundle of human rights obligations. The second step is to identify and analyze the mechanisms that may potentially hold IOM to account for violations of its human rights obligations. I identify the Office of the Inspector General and domestic courts as the only two IOM human rights accountability mechanisms, and analyze their rules on access, participation, neutrality, and outcomes using doctrinal legal methodology. Third, I assess the sufficiency of these two accountability mechanisms, in light of the right to an effective remedy and procedural justice research. The chapter concludes with an overall assessment of IOM’s human rights accountability, and some thoughts on potential avenues for reform.

The 2018 National Academy of Sciences report on proactive policing acknowledges that police strategies to prevent crime are likely to have collateral consequences on community outcomes, and in some cases (such as community-oriented policing) aim to shape community outcomes directly. However, strategies that effectively prevent crime have mixed effects on community outcomes, while approaches that improve community perceptions of the police often do not have strong crime control benefits. In this chapter I propose that the future of proactive policing may depend on developing a better understanding of the complex relationship between communities, police, and crime prevention. Rather than viewing community impacts and crime prevention impacts as two separate processes, I argue that community support and collaboration are inherent to proactivity and may ultimately moderate the success or failure of proactive policing strategies. I conclude with suggestions for future research and theory development to better understand this relationship and translate research into effective practice.

Questions of causality are central to evidence-based policing (EBP), and have been occupying policing scholars in numerous areas. Experiments are considered the “gold standard” for determining causality, but they are not without limitations and are not always feasible. The present chapter explores the potential contribution of “subjective causality” to policing research. Subjective causality is a complementary, qualitative approach to establishing causality, in which relationships are examined and causality is determined through the subjective lens of the individual. Such an explicit approach to causality is uncommon in qualitative research in policing, and could assist in overcoming some of the challenges of the field. In this chapter we demonstrate how subjective causality can contribute to policing by focusing on an area where establishing causality is receiving particular attention: the presumed effect of police-provided procedural justice on police legitimacy. We use in-depth interviews with protestors who participated in “Occupy Israel” demonstrations in 2012 to explore how qualitative data can be used to identify the subjective, causal relationships that individuals make in their own minds between procedural jusice and legitimacy. We also discuss the applicability and potential contribution of this method to policing research more generally.

Law enforcement is increasingly reliant on technology to automate encounters with the public, identify persons to be targeted for further scrutiny, and document interpersonal interactions. As a result, public contacts with police are transitioning from traditional interpersonal interactions to interactions that are increasingly technologically mediated. This chapter reflects on that transition and speculates on the ways in which police–community relations, particularly relations with some racial minority communities, may be affected by this transition. A central argument in favor of technologically mediated law enforcement (e.g., automated license plate readers, facial recognition software, body-worn cameras) is that this new style of policing has the ability to ensure equal protection under the law, enhancing police legitimacy, and mending poor community–police relations. Some see the introduction of technology into law enforcement encounters as a solution to resolving mistrust associated with fractured relations between police and the communities that they serve, particularly for some racial minority communities.

Although proponents of online dispute resolution systems proclaim that their innovations will expand access to justice for so-called “simple cases,” evidence of how the technology actually operates and who is benefitting from it demonstrates just the opposite. Resolution of some disputes may be more expeditious and user interface more intuitive. But in order to achieve this, parties generally do not receive meaningful information about their rights and defenses. The opacity of the technology (ODR code is not public and unlike court appearance its proceedings are private) means that due process defects and systemic biases are difficult to identify and address. Worse still, the “simple cases” argument for ODR assumes that the dollar value of a dispute is a reasonable proxy for its complexity and significance to the parties. This assumption is contradicted by well established research on procedural justice. Moreover, recent empirical studies show that low money value cases, which dominate state court dockets, are for the most part debt collection proceedings brought by well-represented private creditors or public creditors (including courts themselves, which increasingly depend on fines and fees for their operating budget). Defendants in these proceedings are overwhelmingly unrepresented individuals. What ODR offers in these settings is not access to justice for ordinary people, but rather a powerful accelerated collection and compliance technology for private creditors and the state. This chapter examines the design features of ODR and connects them to the ideology of tech evangelism that drives deregulation and market capture, the aspirations of the alternative dispute resolution movement, and hostility to the adversary system that has made strange bedfellows of traditional proponents of access to justice and tech profiteers. The chapter closes with an analysis of front-end standards for courts and bar regulators to consider to ensure that technology marketed in the name of access to justice actually serves the legal needs of ordinary people.

While a shift to virtual courts has been lauded by technological enthusiasts and reformers for decades, little research has examined how this technological change may affect vulnerable unrepresented persons and low-income people in the United States on the “have not” side of the digital divide. In this Chapter, we cast light on how virtual proceedings unfold for low-income unrepresented persons in the everyday. It is important to do so. To date, much of the conversation has lauded Zoom court proceedings as the future of civil justice, centering this praise on idealized forms of online proceedings and their conveniences, without interrogating the impact of the precarity that low-income people contend with or persistent digital divides. In marked departure, we examine how these new technologies affect the experiences of low-income unrepresented persons who encounter, and contend with, adversities within virtual court proceedings. We examine how these new technologies reconfigure the features, affordances, and barriers present within the civil justice system, and the impact of these new technologies on the psychology of judges, lawyers, and unrepresented persons, as well as the impact of these new technologies on the meaning of the judicial role and on a person’s unrepresented status.

This concluding chapter summarises the key findings of the book. It argues that efficiency should not be limited to case disposition but should be looked at more holistically. Procedural justice theory offers valuable insights into how this may be achieved. Moreover, instead of solely focusing on reaching a guilty plea as early as possible, the criminal process should be recalibrated to ensure that the plea decision is indeed an informed and voluntary choice by the defendant. This chapter concludes by discussing areas of future research.