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What is Procedural Justice?: Criteria Used by Citizens to Assess the Fairness of Legal Procedures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Tom R. Tyler
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Abstract

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This paper examines procedural justice in the context of citizen experiences with the police and courts. It is based on interviews of 652 citizens with recent personal experiences involving those authorities. I will consider two issues: first, whether the justice of the procedures involved influences citizen satisfaction with outcomes and evaluations of legal authorities; and second, how citizens define “fair process” in such settings. The results replicate those of past studies, which found that procedural justice has a major influence on both satisfaction and evaluation. They further suggest that such procedural justice judgments are complex and multifaceted. Seven issues make independent contributions to citizen judgments about whether the legal authorities acted fairly: (1) the degree to which those authorities were motivated to be fair; (2) judgments of their honesty; (3) the degree to which the authorities followed ethical principles of conduct; (4) the extent to which opportunities for representation were provided; (5) the quality of the decisions made; (6) the opportunities for error correction; and (7) whether the authorities behaved in a biased fashion. I found that the meaning of procedural justice varied according to the nature of the situation, not the characteristics of the people involved.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , 1988 , pp. 103 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

The data utilized in this paper were collected using funds provided by the National Science Foundation program in Law and Social Science, Grant SES-8310199. Support for analyzing that data and writing this article was provided by the National Science Foundation, the American Bar Foundation, and the Northwestern University Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research. I would like to thank Jonathan Casper, E. Allan Lind, Jo Perry, and Christopher Winship for comments on a draft of this paper.

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