No abstract

A large body of research supports the procedural justice hypothesis that quality of treatment matters more than outcomes for institutional legitimacy. How fairness matters across legal institutions and geographic settings remains an open question, however. This article uses a survey of criminal defendants to test the factors associated with perceived legitimacy of courts in Poland, a country whose judiciary is currently subject to intense political contestation. The findings confirm the primacy of procedural justice, while also illustrating the influence of instrumental performance factors such as time and court organization. This suggests that in contexts of political transition with disputed legal institutions, citizens' contact with procedurally fair, operationally efficient institutions can support the legitimacy of authorities and strengthen the rule of law. After the sentence, someone always loses and is unhappy. Sometimes, indeed, both parties are unhappy, because even those who won did not win as much as they wanted.

Presumptive arrest and prosecution policies are designed to eradicate domestic violence by disrupting abusive relationships and transforming the subjectivities of victimized women and abusive men. Using in-depth interviews with 30 persons arrested and prosecuted for domestic violence, this article examines the power of presumptive policies by exploring how intimate abusers experience them. The study finds that while the police and courts are able to secure arrests and convictions on domestic violence cases, nearly all the respondents in this study understand their punishments as unfair sanctions meted out by an unjust local legal system rather than as the consequences of their own actions. These injustice claims emerge from abusers' group identities as well as the very practices through which the police and courts gain authority over them. These findings demonstrate that the power of the law as a force for social change may be more limited than some have claimed. In addition, they reinforce calls to reform society's response to intimate violence through procedures that can go further in empowering victims and having offenders recognize their responsibility for violence.

The tactics and strategies employed by the United States in its ‘War on Terrorism' have generally been condemned as departures from the norms of how a democratic government conducts itself. Reforms are thus thought needed to place the ‘War on Terror' under the rule of law and protect civil liberties. This article attempts to counter that view. Using predictive data mining-a technology at the heart of the US National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance scandal-as an example, it argues that rather than a break with the past, the tactics that the Bush Administration adopted to fight terrorism represent an extension of a particular type of future-oriented power which Foucault (2008) referred to as "security" or "government." And while individual civil liberties are no doubt at stake, they are not at stake equally for everyone. Predictive data mining discriminates by design, designating certain groups as threats relative to others. Thus, persons with Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds will disproportionately bear the burden of this surveillance technique and the innumerable mistakes it produces. Finally, the rule of law would seem to offer little to remedy the situation. The War on Drugs, the policing of immigration, and past international disputes with ‘terrorist regimes' have provided a "crime jurisprudence" (Simon 2007) that legitimizes such discrimination. Paradoxically and pessimistically then, the real hope for change lies in the crisis of legitimacy that one could expect to result from the wider application of such discriminatory technologies or the benevolent reign of an executive branch that has been imbued with an authority beyond its traditional limits.