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.

This book updates the recent quantitative and qualitative, empirical and theoretical literature on legitimacy, focusing on how it can be measured in diversified research environments. Highlighting the different measurements and the critique surrounding them, this volume is a coherent and systematic guide to theory on legitimacy. This book is divided into three sections: Theoretical framework Legitimacy and its measures Legitimacy International Within these three parts, individual chapters are expected to provide in-depth analysis of core topics, including development, measurement, and cultural disparities, and collectively represent a comprehensive review of legitimacy in theory and in methodology in the global context. The book is ideal for researchers and graduate criminology and criminal justice students.

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

ÔInternational criminal justice indeed is a crowded field. But this edited collection stands well above the crowd. And it does so with dignity. Through interdisciplinary analysis, the editors skillfully turn shibboleths into intrigues. Theirs is a kaleidoscopic project that scales a gamut of issues: from courtroom discipline, to gender, to the defense, to history. Through vivid deployment of unconventional methods, this edited collection unsettles conventional wisdom. It thereby pushes law and policy toward heartier horizons.Õ Ð Mark A. Drumbl, Washington and Lee University, School of Law, US International criminal justice as a discipline throws up numerous conceptual issues, engaging disciplines such as law, politics, history, sociology and psychology, to name but a few. This book addresses themes around international criminal justice from a mixture of traditional and more radical perspectives. While law, and in particular international law, is at the heart of much of the discussion around this topic, history, sociology and politics are invariably infused and, in some aspects of international criminal justice, are predominant elements. Fundamentally the exploration concerns questions of coherence and legitimacy, which are foundational to both the content and application of the discipline, and the book charts an illuminating path through these diverse perspectives. The contributions in this book come from some of the eminent scholars and practitioners in the area, and will provide some profound insight into and an enriched understanding of international criminal justice, helping to advance the field of study. This ambitious and necessary book will appeal to academics and students of international criminal law, international criminal justice, international law, transitional justice and comparative criminal law, as well as practitioners of international criminal law.

In recent decades, research into the legitimacy of criminal justice has convincingly demonstrated the importance of procedural justice to citizens’ sense of trust and confidence in legal authorities and their resulting willingness to conform to the law and cooperate with the legal authorities. Reversing the age-old question ‘why do people break the law?’, theories of procedural justice have provided insight into the factors that encourage people to abide by the law, suggesting that experiences of procedural fairness are crucial to achieving compliance with the law and to enhancing the legitimacy of criminal justice. While these studies are important in showing that legal authorities need to pay attention to the fairness judgements of the people involved in legal procedures, the focus on showing the importance of procedural justice has had the ironic consequence of distracting researchers from studying the equally important question of what fairness means to the people involved in legal proceedings. In one of the first studies on procedural justice to use a qualitative research design, the author provides the reader with detailed and insightful descriptions of the elements that determine how victims and defendants assess the fairness of their contact with the police and the courts. Focusing on both the pre-trial and the post-trial phases, this book will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of the psychology of law, procedural justice and the legitimacy of criminal justice.