Procedural Justice Theory and Law: A Socio-Legal Approach

• In Event: POLWG Panel 3: Trust in policing: Reflections on police legitimacy and procedural justice

Abstract

Since its earliest inceptions, Procedural Justice Theory (PJT) has focused not only on the impact that police behaviours can have on public perceptions of legitimacy and willingness to cooperate with authorities such as the police, but also on their perceptions of and willingness to obey the law itself. Over the past few decades, many issues with and suggestions for theoretical improvements to PJT have been suggested, arising from empirical tests of its claims in varying settings and contexts; suggestions for methodological improvements to its concepts, their indicators and their measurements; or questioning the underpinnings and application of the theory itself and its assumptions about power in society. Research and literature in each of these suggested areas for potential improvement of the theory has touched upon the issue of ‘law’, but the concept of ‘law’ in and of itself as part of the wider PJT has rarely been considered in depth – potentially as most contributions to PJT have come from the academic disciplines of criminology, social psychology, or ‘police studies’. This paper adopts a socio-legal approach to PJT, to suggest issues with the conceptualization of ‘law’ in both the research methods used to study PJT, and as a core but underdeveloped concept within the theory. These issues include: conflation of ‘the law’ with the narrower criminal law; viewing law as a monolith rather than as often contradictory and in conflict with each other (as often occurs with criminal laws, police powers and human rights law); that increasingly discretion means that police may be creating law rather than merely procedurally enforcing it; and that law may not always be ‘good’ law. It therefore argues that a socio-legal approach may allow us a more sophisticated understanding and consideration of the role of the ‘law’ in PJT than previous models have achieved.

Author

• Charmian Werren, University of East Anglia