This hybrid seminar hosted by the UNSW Centre for Crime, Law and Justice (CCLJ) will take place in person at the UNSW Law & Justice Building (Staff Common Room, Level 2) and online via Zoom. Please indicate your attendance preference on checkout.
Abstract:
For some time, restorative justice has been promoted as a radically different and seemingly better approach to violation than conventional criminal justice. However, there is a disconnect between that promise and the way in which restorative justice is both conceptualised and applied in practice. In part, the reason for this failure is that restorative justice has failed to develop an adequate account of what it is really about all the way down. In this paper, I seek to address this gap by setting up a contrast between an ethically real conception of restorative justice—what I call ‘reconciliatory restorative justice’—and ‘legal restorative justice’. The former takes the (naturalistic) moral psychology of violation and its repair seriously. The latter is the upshot of twin moves of subsumption and cooption that repeat the status quo.
Speaker Biography:
Amanda Wilson is a Leverhulme Trust Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Law School. She has been researching and writing about alternative justice mechanisms for over a decade and has collaborated with a number of leading experts from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. She works closely with key policy and practice organisations such as His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service’s Restorative Practice Hub, the European Forum for Restorative Justice, and the Global Alliance for Restorative and Social Justice. Her current monograph project, Restoring Restorative Justice (Oxford University Press), pursues an ethically real-institutionally critical account of restorative justice through moral psychology.
