Restoring Justice Review - Book Report/Review Example

Van Ness, Strong et. al’s excellent book, Restoring Justice: An Introduction to Restorative Justice attempts to mend this void and give its readers a strong backing in restorative justice principles, so that they can engage in them further whenever necessary. In only two hundred and fifty pages, this book gives its readers a good sense of the reasoning behind the need for restorative justice, the theoretical underpinnings of restorative justice practices, the history of historical justice, the future of restorative justice, and what challenges emerge from enacting social justice in the theory and practice of law.

The most successful aspect of this book is its accessibilities to people who have not had previous experience with restorative justice – it is highly readable and understandable, while still strongly advocating its position that restorative justice is a necessary component of the creation, study and practice of law. . Restoring Justice starts at the very beginning, the fundamental level of action that creates oppression – “patterned though” (Van Ness, Strong et. al. 2). It describes this patterned thought as a process by which people are able to understand the massive amount of data that they encounter over the course of a length of time, without which it would be impossible to function (4).

The problem, however, is that patterned though blocks critical analysis of new information, information that does not fit within the pattern (5). Though the authors use this description to outline the development of legal systems generally, to describe the way the process of law first emerged (as a way of enacting a social defense for everyone in a society and provide recompense for victims of crime and their families) and then emerged into the kind of law that we see today, which is primarily concerned with upholding the power and privilege of the nation state, and the emergence of new kinds of justice, such as informal justice, indigenous justice and the ideals of restitution (13).

This analysis is incredibly useful in explaining to a neophyte of restorative justice why restorative justice is essential to an equitable practice of law – because the makers of the law have set up often impossible situations that push people further into oppression, and our modes of thought are so determined by patterns of thinking that have largely been informed by our legal system that we assume and understand that to be reasonable. Beyond this, the author’s explanations of patterns of thinking help the reader to understand how quickly damaging practices that need restorative justice can be engrained – the devaluation and dehumanization of